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Date:      Wed, 09 Aug 2006 10:53:09 -0500
From:      Aaron Gibson <agibson@confabulator.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Telecom
Message-ID:  <44DA04E5.8030901@confabulator.net>
In-Reply-To: <20060802131420.79edspqrwgok4s8s@216.219.94.118>
References:  <20060802131420.79edspqrwgok4s8s@216.219.94.118>

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root@rithy4u.net wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> Can we use FreeBSD in Telecom industry? If I want to build an Internet 
> Backbone which connect across country in asia. Is it suitable? How is 
> its stability of routing compare to Cisco?
> 
> Rgds,
> 
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> 

juniper routers do exactly this (freebsd for network routing protocols, 
asics for hardware forwarding). Not sure how they compare to Ci$co (I'm 
assuming cost is driving factor for evaluating freebsd as a routing 
platform).

freebsd can do bgp/ospf/etc with software such as: quagga or zebra, or 
the newer xorp.

some people have used freebsd as a routing platform for large networks, 
see occaid.org (their network was built with freebsd/quagga and ip-ip 
tunnels, although they did have some juniper m5s)

what you will probably find is that routing in software may not offer 
the performance required for a backbone network. This is of course 
dependent on your needs, and some people (occaid) have achieved 
line-rate (small packets) ip forwarding with intel pro 1000 cards and 
some patches to enable fastforwarding for ipv6 in freebsd.

hope this is of some help. I can't give any numbers with regard to 
stability -- quagga/zebra did have some issues as I recall.

for large amounts of traffic it may help to enable device driver polling 
to reduce interrupt overhead.

--Aaron



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