Tag Archives: prefix-list

A utility to perform IPv4 & IPv6 prefix aggregation

I’m a fan of the aggregate program, which, in its own words, is used to “optimise a list of route prefixes to help make nice short filters”. However, it doesn’t work for IPv6! It was written by Joe Abley back in the 1990’s, and is useful in lots of scripts, but the lack of IPv6 support is starting to be an issue for me.

Using the IPy python module, I’ve created a similar tool that handles both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes. Like the old tool, it can handle host addresses that don’t have a netmask specified, and can truncate the network portion to match the netmask if they are mismatched. I also added support for pre-1993 classful networking (since IOS and Quagga/Zebra still seem to leave the mask off such networks, two decades post-CIDR).

It doesn’t have all the features of the old aggregate command (i.e. –max-opt-lengh, etc), but it has all the features I used, and some that I had always wished for.

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