Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 01:00:47 -0600 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: "Odhiambo Washington" <wash@wananchi.com>, "FBSD-Q" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, kweheria@iconnect.co.ke Subject: Re: Isn't it true? Message-ID: <200108080700.f7870l440614@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <001201c11fca$ff0ecf20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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On Tue, 7 Aug 2001 22:28:46 -0700 "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: +------------------ | 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. :-) +------------------ Ted, It appears that you have confused the OP's product selection with some other device. I looked over the description of the Mainstreet 2701 at http://www.cid.alcatel.com/doctypes/product/html/ The 2701 appears to be an async NTU for use in a private TDM network. From what I've read it looks like the OP is right on track to a robust solution assuming that the circit between the two 2701 is two unloaded copper pair A standard PC style 16550A UART should work perfectly. there is no need for a fancy synchronous interface card. Infact one will not work with the V.24 interface on the 2701. For this application the 2701 is a bit of overkill, If it is surplus hardware that's great. But if he is buying hardware to do this and has line of sight I might recomend a pair of ORiNOCO 802.11b cards and a pair of dish antennae. chris +------------------ | | 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 intend ed | to be used for WANS that have redundant links because as links come up and g o | 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 Sangom a, | 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, t he | 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 use d | 2501 with a RS232 sync cable that I'd sell but if you want to pursue that ta ke | it offline with me. I'm sure that you can find used vendors that are in you r | 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 goi ng | 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 +------------------ -- Chris Fedde 303 773 9134 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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