Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 15:55:11 -0500 From: Bill Vermillion <bv@wjv.com> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Network oriented services with FreeBSD Message-ID: <20050326205511.GA66110@wjv.com> In-Reply-To: <200503261429.09441.asstec@matik.com.br> References: <20050325213410.25058.qmail@web26804.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <42457751.3090608@buckhorn.net> <200503261429.09441.asstec@matik.com.br>
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On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 14:29 , the murky waters churned and seethed, the dark weeds parted and the water took on the sinister, shifting visage we recognize as Suporte Matik. The great maw opened, and the following was heard: > On Saturday 26 March 2005 11:53, Bob Martin wrote: > > We do all of our routing and firewalls with FreeBSD, instead of > > dedicated equipment like Cisco. In short, a Xeon based PC (we're > > using mostly ~2ghz, single processor boxen) that can be bought for > > less than a $1000 will do almost anything a $15,000 dollar name > > brand router will do. And it will do a few things the named brand > > units wont, like traffic analysis. Instead of having the dedicated > > equipment and a server, we just have a server. > probably not a fair comparism since your $15K router will have some > pretty clever interfaces which you possible do not get or at least > have to buy to put them into your PC and configure them if you can. > Lots of things IOS can do FreeBSd can still not, as CEF, class maps, > loadbalance, backuproute, VoIP to call only some > IMO BGP with Zebra on FBSD also is not close and reliable enough to > CISCO BGP . > So what you say may be ok for a simple router with some functions but > a cisco 2xxx does not cost 15k but all depends on size of the > network. May be an ISP with a small link does it well without > dedicated router but if you talk about network services I don't > know ... > And don't forget the disks, I will not even think about if a HD > crashes on a network router. I have some Ciscos running a couple of > years now without touching them. > Hans I put FreeBSD in as a roouter twice. Once when a brand new Cisco failed within 3 weeks where even the screen during boot failed. Infant mortality. 7120. It was replace overnight by air and 4 years later it started rebooting - and I swapped in a FreeBSD. Turns out something was corrupted - perhaps some intrusion. Moved over to a Foundry router/switch - and wound up with one piece of hardware to replace the route plus 2948. I just prefer hardware for the reasons you do. The 7210 ran 3 years before it developed problems. And at the previous place I worked we even replaced a quirky DS3 interface card on my huge 7513 while the system was hot and running so we didn't have to interupt any outbound T1s. We lost global network connectivity for no more than 30 seconds during that hot swap. That was a huge beast and overkill for what we were doing but we got it at awfully good price and what we were doing then required a DS3 - and that was when only one provider could give us those connection speeds. Oh how the world has changed in 8 year. We're small but for many things HW is so much simpler - and if something happens to one of us there are plenty of people familiar with the dedicated hardware. Bill -- Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com
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