Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 22:28:46 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Odhiambo Washington" <wash@wananchi.com>, "FBSD-Q" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: <kweheria@iconnect.co.ke> Subject: RE: Isn't it true? Message-ID: <001201c11fca$ff0ecf20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20010807181041.C35856@everest.wananchi.com>
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Hi Odhiambo, Sorry about the top post here, but I wanted to give you the detailed explanation before you start spending money on things, and before the rest of the eager beavers here had got you totally confused. :-) You see, here in the US we don't use icky things like 64k sync circuits anymore and most WAN techs are very unfamiliar with the oddball hardware used to connect that stuff. Instead, high speed WANS here are based around a thing called a T1 or 1/24th of a t1 called a 56k circuit. We use things called DSU's that plug them in, which are different than the DTU's like the Mainstreet 2701. By the way, thanks for the plug. :-) For starters, for just a single point-to-point link you don't need Zebra. At most if one side has a gateway to the Internet you might have a couple of static routes in the routers. Zebra, gated, and routed are intended to be used for WANS that have redundant links because as links come up and go down the routes change, and the routing daemons manage those route table changes. Your WAN bandwidth is precious and expensive and you don't want to waste it by shipping routing updates across it for routes that will never change. Secondly, yes you can use a FreeBSD box in place of a Cisco router. I do it at the ISP that I admin and I run BGP4 with a full BGP feed on it. I have 2 T1's and 2 100BaseT Ethernet connections into the box, and 3 of the connections are Internet feeds. It works fairly well. The route table on that system is close to 100k routes. I use gated. Now, in your case I looked up the specs for the Mainstreet 2701. First of all the serial cable that comes out of it is a V.24 interface, it is NOT an X.21 interface!! Your not going to be happy with the results attempting to plug it into an X.21 interface card. ;-) Secondly, it appears to be a _synchronous_ RS232C interface. While it is electrically compatible with a PC serial port, a garden variety PC serial port is asynchronous, NOT synchronous, so that won't work either. As far as I know, there's only 2 vendors that currently are selling sync serial cards with V.24 that will run under FreeBSD, the first is Sangoma, and the second (the vendor that I use) is a WANic 400 or 405, from SBS Technologies. In my case I actually use the RISCom cards, they are the predicessor cards to the WANic 400/405. It's the same chipset, and made by the same vendor, the only difference is that one card is ISA the other is PCI. In fact, the sync controller chipset in both of those cards is the HD64570 chip, which is EXACTLY the same chip as Cisco uses in the 25xx series of routers. (2501, 2511, 2522, etc.) Now for the bad news: a new WANic is going to cost about $800 USD unless you can possibly find one used. (and goodness knows I've tried - the 2 RISCom cards I got were used and they were eye-raising expensive as it was) This is more money than if you get up on Ebay and buy yourself a used Cisco 2522 or 2501 or something like that, plus cabling. (In fact, I've got a used 2501 with a RS232 sync cable that I'd sell but if you want to pursue that take it offline with me. I'm sure that you can find used vendors that are in your country without the messiness of the import/export stuff) So, in summary if you want to use FreeBSD to save money, you won't because the cost of a sync V.24 is going to be the killer. If, however, you want to do it just for fun, then that's fine - but remember that you have got 2 offices there and if your toy goes offline in the middle of the day your going to have a lot of pissed-off people. :-) In our case the cost of a Cisco 7206 (the minimum Cisco capabable of running BGP without up and dying) is about $30,000 USD so that was plenty of financial incentive to go the BSD route. (no pun intended) Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Odhiambo >Washington >Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 8:11 AM >To: FBSD-Q >Cc: kweheria@iconnect.co.ke >Subject: Isn't it true? > > >Such a dumb subject line but isn't it true that nobody in the >knowledge-rich FreeBSD world has ever gone out of their 'mind' (I mean >their way) and done something like substituting a FreeBSD box for a Cisco >router like this: > Telco Link _____ > LAN<-->[____]----->[...]================[...]----->|_____|<----->LAN > FreeBSD Mainstreet Mainstreet Cisco > Box 2701 2701 2522 > > >If someone _ever_ tried it, I request to share in their feat ;-) > > >Thanks > > >-Wash > >-- >Odhiambo Washington >Wananchi Online Ltd., >wash@wananchi.com 1st Flr Loita Hse. >Tel: 254 2 313985 Loita Street., >Fax: 254 2 313922 PO Box 10286,00100-NAIROBI,KE. > >To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a >racehorse on a treadmill. >-Charles Caleb Colton > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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