Glossary

BGP and routing

Adj-RIB-In
Routes accepted from a peer and retained before or alongside local best-path selection. Ze does not keep every import-rejected route unless a component explicitly records it.

Adj-RIB-Out
Routes selected and prepared for advertisement to one peer.

AFI/SAFI
Address Family Identifier and Subsequent Address Family Identifier. Together they identify a BGP family such as IPv4 unicast, EVPN, or FlowSpec.

AS path
The sequence of autonomous systems a BGP route has traversed. Ze uses it for loop detection, policy, best-path selection, and topology display.

BGP Role
An RFC 9234 relationship such as provider, customer, peer, route server, or route-server client. Roles help detect route leaks and control OTC processing.

End-of-RIB
A BGP marker indicating that the initial or refreshed update stream for a family is complete.

FIB
Forwarding Information Base. The routes programmed into a dataplane such as the Linux kernel, VPP, or P4.

Loc-RIB
The local set of selected routes after protocol and policy processing.

NLRI
Network Layer Reachability Information. The family-specific route payload carried by BGP.

RIB
Routing Information Base. A route store used for candidate, accepted, selected, or advertised routing state, depending on context.

RPKI
Resource Public Key Infrastructure. Ze uses validated ROA data received over RTR to determine whether a route origin is Valid, Invalid, or NotFound.

RTR
RPKI-to-Router protocol used between a validating cache and a router.

Resilience and policy

ADD-PATH
A BGP capability that allows more than one path for the same prefix to cross a session. Send and receive modes are negotiated per family.

Graceful Restart
RFC 4724 behaviour that retains stale forwarding state while a BGP speaker restarts and refreshes its routes.

Long-Lived Graceful Restart
RFC 9494 extension that retains and deprioritises stale routes beyond the ordinary Graceful Restart window.

Import filter
An ordered policy chain applied to a route received from a peer before it enters eligible local routing state.

Export filter
An ordered policy chain applied for one destination peer before advertisement.

OTC
Only-to-Customer, the RFC 9234 path attribute used with BGP Roles to detect and prevent route leaks.

Route reflection
RFC 4456 distribution of iBGP routes through reflectors and clients, avoiding a full iBGP mesh.

Route server
A BGP speaker that distributes eligible routes between participants while preserving the participant next hop and applying per-member policy.

Ze configuration and operation

Active configuration
The configuration revision currently applied to the running system.

Candidate configuration
A proposed configuration revision being edited and validated before commit.

Commit
The transaction that verifies, applies, and activates a candidate configuration. In route injection, a named commit window groups route operations atomically.

Component
A Ze subsystem that owns runtime behaviour, configuration, commands, health, metrics, or plugins.

Doctor
Offline readiness checks run with ze doctor. Findings have structured diagnostic codes that can be inspected with ze explain.

Handler
A callback registered by a component or plugin for configuration, commands, events, codecs, validation, or lifecycle stages.

Plugin
A registered Ze extension. Plugins may run in process or as external programs and can own configuration, commands, events, filters, families, services, or dataplane integration.

Plugin hub
The authenticated transport and dispatch layer used by external plugins and managed components. It is separate from Fleet Management even when configuration shares a surrounding plugin block.

ZeFS
Ze's blob storage format for configuration, credentials, revisions, and other registered data.

Operator surfaces

CLI
The interactive or one-shot command interface reached over Ze's SSH server.

gNMI
The OpenConfig gRPC Network Management Interface used for YANG-oriented Capabilities, Get, Set, and Subscribe operations.

Looking Glass
The public read-only BGP peer, route, search, and AS-path view. It runs separately from the authenticated web workbench.

MCP
Model Context Protocol. Ze exposes registered commands and structured resources to authorised AI clients through its MCP server.

Web workbench
The authenticated browser interface for configuration, commands, operational tables, and live state.

Testing

Functional transcript
A .ci scenario that drives real processes, commands, files, HTTP requests, peers, and expected outputs.

Interop test
A scenario that runs Ze against another real implementation such as FRR, BIRD, GoBGP, strongSwan, xl2tpd, or accel-ppp.

Property
An invariant checked across a scenario, such as convergence, route isolation, or state consistency.

Shrink
Reduction of a recorded chaos event sequence to the smallest sequence that still reproduces a failure.