The reference tool for dynamic routing is currently quagga, from the similarly-named package; it used to be zebra until development of the latter stopped. However, quagga kept the names of the programs for compatibility reasons which explains the zebra commands below.

Quagga is a set of daemons cooperating to define the routing tables to be used by the Linux kernel; each routing protocol (most notably BGP, OSPF and RIP) provides its own daemon. The zebra daemon collects information from other daemons and handles static routing tables accordingly. The other daemons are known as bgpd, ospfd, ospf6d, ripd, ripngd, isisd, and babeld.

Daemons are enabled by editing the /etc/quagga/daemons file and creating the appropriate configuration file in /etc/quagga/; this configuration file must be named after the daemon, with a .conf extension, and belong to the quagga user and the quaggavty group, in order for the /etc/init.d/quagga script to invoke the daemon.

The configuration of each of these daemons requires knowledge of the routing protocol in question. These protocols cannot be described in detail here, but the quagga-doc provides ample explanation in the form of an info file. The same contents may be more easily browsed as HTML on the Quagga website: In addition, the syntax is very close to a standard router's configuration interface, and network administrators will adapt quickly to quagga.