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Yes, it sucks. It's complicated.

Check out the Sangoma S518 card. I was shocked they were still selling it all these years later. Be warned that the drivers are really difficult to get working though. I never did get this card working with my local ADSL provider.

http://wiki.sangoma.com/wanpipe-linux-adsl-support

I think these are mostly for development rather than actual use, but whatever.

Single pair is just so dead.

We have an Open Source project called FreeSWITCH http://www.freeswitch.org/ that allows you to do this sort of thing with any computer running Windows MAC or most UNIX. It can be paired with traditional phones with a small analog adapter or a hardware telephony card from Sangoma http://www.sangoma.com./ But you could just get a software phone for free as well and play around with it.
 

There are plenty of PCI WAN boards with Linux API/drivers on the market. You can get 1-8 port T1, 1-4 port OC3, and 1-2 port ATM and DS-3 boards. Most of them support channelized links, so you can break your T1 into 12 channels for data and 12 digital voice lines.

Here is a list of companies you can get them from:
http://www.sbei.com/ (distributor/products page http://www.ace-electronics.com/Hardware/T1E1J1/t1i ndex.html)

http://www.imagestream.com/Industrial_Cards.html - they even have a 4 port OC3 PCI card

http://www.sangoma.com/main/products/wanpipe - solid Linux support and drivers

http://www.digium.com/ - has 1, 2 and 4 port T1 boards that work GREAT with linux

Of course installation and configuration of this kind of solution will not be as simple as a Cisco WIC in your 2600.

It looks like they have a relationship with Sangoma for at least T1 and T3 support. Don't know about ATM support. Here's a link on Sangoma's site:
http://www.sangoma.com/main/products/wanpipe

Ah:

If you're looking for T1/E1 cards, Sangoma has what you need. Appearantly, they also have cards that have an onboard CSU/DSU and plug in straight from the DMARC via Cat5/RJ45 (note: not ethernet).

They also have a variety of dual BNC T3/E3 cards.

If they're industry standard HDLC interfaces, they should work with the above mentioned software implementations.

Also: I wanted to add, that was all on a Celly 633 for the longest time; in 2003 I think we upgraded it to an Athlon XP 1700+ or so. Computing 5 T-1's times 115,000 routes once a minute was a lot of work, appearantly, and the more ram the better, since BGPD keeps routes in memory. I think we had 1GB in it. My point being, the machine wasn't your leftover Packard Bell 233, but it wasn't a monster. I figured out at some point that the whole thing, in hardware costs, was less than $4k, and the 3 Cyclades cards were more than $2500 of that.

~Will

David Mandelstam of Sangoma will give a talk at SCALE 4x about building low cost open-source VoIP solutions.

Look at postfix + mysql
http://www.sweeney.demon.co.uk/pfix_imap_virtual.h tml

Mostly, U will need a cluster for everything.
If you are seeking for a all around opensource, start with this link, later, to use LVS, the tool for makeking load balancing clusters go here:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

And if you really are looking for a opensource cheap software costs (not very cheap tco) also you can build your OWN san with ata over ethernet:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoetools/

And for webmail a usefull but also ligth interface:
http://www.squirrelmail.org/

With all the licence cost savings, you can Invest a lot of time, and have a fair amount of flexibility.

Sendmail inc, has high availability solutions:
www.sendmail.com

Also, you can spend a lot of money and buy a very bit IBM machine with lots, and lots of lotus notes licenses, with that kind of money spent, you can put IBM at your knees if a lawer makes a good contract..

Also, to complete the solution you can setup nagios and mrtg for monitoring.
http://www.nagios.org/
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

I think, to setup the hole thing, U will need, like about 50 good servers, (maybe u can try IBM openpower with virtualization, it IS a risc CPU), and like.. humm.. a month of technical tests...

The mysql backend will give you centralized administration, LVS will provide scalability and good servers will give you uptime...

And if EVEN you like, you can make a Linux Routers using sangoma hardware:
http://wwww.sangoma.com/

Everything can be done with Linux by now... The cuestion is how much responsability do you want to have regarding the stability, and overall functionality of the solution.

IBM, HP, RedHat, SuSe, and ANY Linux Consulting firm would be interested in having you as a success history.

Good Luck, and May the Source be With You

I ran into the same exact thing with a Cisco 2620 on a T1. It was fine doing standard routing (ie. the IT Manager I replaced had all the desktops in the office on public IPs). As soon as I set it up to do NAT, I would have to flush the NAT Table several times a day otherwise the router would slow to a halt. As a side note (to lead this a little more off topic, haha) I ended up replacing that router with a really old server we took out of production (dual 450 w/512Mb RAM) and a Sangoma serial interface card (T1) which has very good Linux support. That was over a year ago -- havent had a problem with the router since, not to mention all the other stuff I can do with it now that I could not do with the cisco.

One of the most efficient deployments, in terms of billing, is as a loss leader. By this I mean where you deploy it for free, with the hopes that the increase in traffic (foot traffic) will more than make up for the cost. This model works for coffee shops, hotels, some restaurants, and perhaps even housing or office complexes.

Example (and shameless plug):
I have set up just such a network in the plaza where my office is located, Lake Anne (in Reston, Virginia). We have a T1, and have wired up four of the restaurants with access points. We are using 802.11b, no encryption, no signups, just come out and connect. The restaurants pay us for the access and to maintain the equipment, which goes a long way to defraying to cost of the T1. The restaurants have "WiFi Zone" stickers in the windows, and we are trying to get some local press coverage.

Most days, I see at least a few people with their laptops in the various restuarants (one of them is, in fact, a coffee shop). I can hardly wait for the spring, since the access extends to the benches surrounding the dock (the plaza is at one end of a small lake).

For the curious, we use a combination of Netgear wireless routers, Apple Airport Extremes, and a FreeBSD gateway/firewall (with a Sangoma T1 adapter in it-- no router necessary). Our F.A.Q. (a work in progress) covers the most common questions people have to hook up, and the restaurants all have a printout of it just in case . The best part is, it works!

And, just to add something to my original post. I am a proponent for using Linux in certain routing situations. I have used it with a T1 with a Sangoma PCI CSU/DSU card. It works very well and very reliably, once you get it configured. However, you have to mess around with drivers and such, which is something you don't need to do with Cisco hardware. Cisco stuff "just works."

Webopedia TCP/IP Entry
Sangoma's TCP/IP Routing Tutorial

In a nutshell, the IP address space was designed so that information about routing was built in to the addresses themselves by dividing it into two parts: a network (n) part and a host (h) part. Since they wanted as much flexibility as possible to assign big networks and little networks with just enough hosts, they broke the address space into classes A,B,C, etc. that could be determined by inspection of value of the first octet.

To deterimine the class of the address, you first you have to write out the first octet of the address in binary.

If the first octet starts with 0 binary (meaning the first octet itself is between 0 and 127 decimal), then it is a CLASS A address. The first octet is the network address and the last three octets are taken together to be the host address (n.h.h.h). This means it has a netmask of /8 or 255.0.0.0 and there are 2^24 individual hosts available for addressing and/or subnetting. Note that the loopback 127.0.0.1 and the 10.0.0.0 nets are both class A.

If the first octet starts with 10 binary (meaning the first octet is between 128 and 191), it's a CLASS B with two octets for the net address and two for the host (n.n.h.h). It has a netmask of /16 or 255.255.0.0 with 2^16 hosts to address or subnet.

If the first octet starts with 110 binary (meaning it's between 192 and 223 decimal), it's a CLASS C with three octets to specify the network and one for the host (n.n.n.h). These have netmask /24 or 255.255.255.0 with 2^8=256 host addresses.

Of course, this is all goes out the window with CIDR. High-speed dedicated routers brought the realization that the class-ful blocks we unnecessary and you could just use the subnet mask itself to determine routing. This allowed them to use more flexible rules to arbitrarily divide the address blocks into smaller chunks like /2, /3, /15. etc.

Really a T1 isn't a bunch of equipment... the CSU/DSU is analgous to your cable modem, and then you need some sort of router, same as a cable modem. The only difference is that they use a (pricey) serial interface to the router last I checked.

The telco might put in a little box with some cards in it, but that's owned by them, so you don't need to mess with it.

Sangoma makes an internal PCI CSU/DSU that is completely compatible with Linux (open source drivers in the kernel).

If you use this, you can have CSU/DSU, firewall, and router all in one Linux box. Just plug the raw T1 right into the Linux box and it comes up as a network interface. We've had one of these running 2 years with no trouble at all.

They weren't cheap when we bought ours (About $800), but then again, CSU/DSUs can be pricey too unless you can pick one up used, and last I checked, most CSU/DSUs made you use exotic serial cables (RS-422?) to connect to your router, which must support said exotic serial interface.

I am experimenting with IPFW/DUMMYNET for bandwidth shaping, but using ipfilter for the firewall. A little more complicated, but I think it gives me the best of everything (I really like ipfilter, but it lacks bandwidth shaping features). This is for an ISP, so it will handle workstations and a variety of different servers. We use a PCI T1 card from Sangoma, and multiple port ethernet cards. This allows me to create a DMZ (or several) quite easily. The config, overall, looks confusing at first but really isn't.

Once it is fully implemented, I plan to publish the details (network diagram and config files). FreeBSD is perfect for this task.

BTW- for the curious, what I describe is a poor man's Juniper switch.

I am experimenting with IPFW/DUMMYNET for bandwidth shaping, but using ipfilter for the firewall. A little more complicated, but I think it gives me the best of everything (I really like ipfilter, but it lacks bandwidth shaping features). This is for an ISP, so it will handle workstations and a variety of different servers. We use a PCI T1 card from Sangoma, and multiple port ethernet cards. This allows me to create a DMZ (or several) quite easily. The config, overall, looks confusing at first but really isn't.

Once it is fully implemented, I plan to publish the details (network diagram and config files). FreeBSD is perfect for this task.

BTW- for the curious, what I describe is a poor man's Juniper switch.

I am experimenting with IPFW/DUMMYNET for bandwidth shaping, but using ipfilter for the firewall. A little more complicated, but I think it gives me the best of everything (I really like ipfilter, but it lacks bandwidth shaping features). This is for an ISP, so it will handle workstations and a variety of different servers. We use a PCI T1 card from Sangoma, and multiple port ethernet cards. This allows me to create a DMZ (or several) quite easily. The config, overall, looks confusing at first but really isn't.

Once it is fully implemented, I plan to publish the details (network diagram and config files). FreeBSD is perfect for this task.

BTW- for the curious, what I describe is a poor man's Juniper switch.

I am experimenting with IPFW/DUMMYNET for bandwidth shaping, but using ipfilter for the firewall. A little more complicated, but I think it gives me the best of everything (I really like ipfilter, but it lacks bandwidth shaping features). This is for an ISP, so it will handle workstations and a variety of different servers. We use a PCI T1 card from Sangoma, and multiple port ethernet cards. This allows me to create a DMZ (or several) quite easily. The config, overall, looks confusing at first but really isn't.

Once it is fully implemented, I plan to publish the details (network diagram and config files). FreeBSD is perfect for this task.

BTW- for the curious, what I describe is a poor man's Juniper switch.

The vendor whose Linux support that simply blew me away was Sangoma! They wrote a quad port PPP over HDLC Linux driver for the S5142 WANPipe card to solve my company's problem. We needed a router to handle 8 PPP ports for an old leased line and thanks to Sangoma we had a cheap and robust Linux solution.

That was back on 2.2.16. I remember some changes in the PPP kernel code caused problems on releases above that but I am sure it's ancient history now.

I cannot recommend Sangoma highly enough. Great product, service, and people.

Sangoma has full Linux support on all their WanRouter series of PCI based CSU/DSU cards. It's nice to eliminate the unnecessary hardware and be able to run a firewall directly on your Linux CSU/DSU. The drivers never crash in my experience, it's fully as stable as a "real" CSU/DSU.

If you have a fractional or full T1, be sure to check out Sangoma before you shell out lots of money for Cisco stuff.

Sangoma makes WAN cards that run under Linux. They work great under every Linux distro/kernel I have tried. Additionally, Sangoma provides quaility tech support. You can even talk to the man who worte the Linux drivers.

Sangoma is a excellent company to work with when it comes to linux-related issues. They make internal T-1 CSU/DSU router cards that can save a company a bundle.

They produced the drivers themselves, and therefore know them inside and out when you need support. I've even had them offer to log into the box I was working on and set things up for me (granted if the t-1 is your only connection thats kind of impossible!)

The best way to go is surf around on the net and find an intro-level T1 howto-- this is a good one. You'll also need some hardware to start up with--the small Intel routers are nice and easy to set up. Sangoma cards are great if you are comfortable with Linux. Unfortunately, though, the documentation that comes with both of these are less-than-helpful unless you have a basic understanding of T1 stuff, which is best reaped from the web.

We just installed a T1 at work through Qwest and we tried to do everything we could by ourselves that we could. We were pretty successful. We were just insistent that we didn't want to use their VPN, management, DNS servers, and domain registry. We would have wanted to go with a more major player like UUNET or Genuity, but Qwest offered us the best 1 year contract at about $800/mo for a site pretty far away from their POP downtown. Qwest did handle all the wrangling with the local telco, but this was welcome. Dealing with the telco is voodoo magic sometimes. From our research we found it's just as much to get a T1 from a major bandwidth provider than from a local ISP, so whatever floats your boat..

Something that we used to save a bundle was using a WAN card with an integrated CSU/DSU in our existing Linux router machine. We ended up spending just $250 on a Sangoma S508/FT1 on eBay! The card is just ISA but I doubt we'd be upgrading the current routing machine to something with just PCI anytime soon. Not only was it cheap as hell, it was a piece of cake to set up to boot. I wouldn't do a T1 any other way. Sangoma rocks and has been supporting Linux for years (they also support BSD, Windows 9x, NT, Solaris, etc etc.) Check out their website for their goodies. Of course, I have no affiliation with them other than dealing with their great stuff. There are other WAN cards out there of course.

Ian

There are companies out there that go the extra mile in delivering a quality solution. The two most recent examples that come to my mind are Vividata and Sangoma. Vividata assisted with tuning PostShop to crank out TIFFs an impressive speed that was well beyond it's marketing promises. Sangoma brought out early a very interesting way to run PPP over HDLC using using Linux (this was a year and half ago). Support was stellar and immediate. Not to mention fun being the lunatic fringe.

There are so-so companies out there as well. Pixel translations, Install Shield, and Sun come to mind as OK support. All of them seem to push out support issues on the technicalities.

The worst of the breed are the vendors that won't give you the time of day. The worst of the worst is Kofax. Find a salesman, buy bulk units, purchase support, and they will tell you that you have to buy X toolkit to ask that question. Arrgggghhh! I get angry just thinking about them. Too bad they are almost a monopoly!

A lot of the time I don't think it has much to do with cost. Some of the worst vendors for support have been the most costly.

I think part of the problem is some people expect support to solve all their problems including integration and deployment issues. I cannot stand it when people sit idle waiting for tech support from some vendor to solve their problems for them. It ain't gonna happen if you don't work with them actively. If you haven't read the docs, applied the patches, and RTFM'd get off the freakin' phone lines.

I cannot resist comment on this as well.

Extortionate service contracts are now routinely offered -- special arrangements by which people who spend thousands of dollars on hardware and software spend hundreds more just for "priority access" to get the kind of minimal support that's standard in other businesses, and that ought to be included free with their purchases.

I am sure the vendors offering such contracts would be willing to roll the costs into the product itself. I for one am glad that I don't have to pay for support for all of the clueless "technicians" of the world.

Lastly check out this website, it has nothing to do with the topic but I could use more visitors.

THere are a few ways to do this... A small footprint PC, combined with LRP Linux a single floppy based distro, and a Sangoma WANPIPE and poof T1/Frac T1 Router/Bridge w/ integral CSU/DSU. With the cost of Pentium and older 486 computers these days this makes a good combo.

How much do you think it costs to hook a T1 (or E1 for the Europeans) to your Linux box. Hint, check out http://www.sangoma.com. You can get cisco routers this old pretty cheap now.

I have a fractional T1 service... but "fractional" can mean a lot of different speeds, and in my case it's only 128 kbps. It is expensive to set up a T1 service, but at least in Portland Oregon, it's not quite as bad as you make it out to be.

The most expensive part is the upstream service from an ISP. Most ISPs are quite expensive. I did quite a bit of searching in my area, and I found two with competitive prices. I went with Internet Arena, because the other was some christian place with filtering at their router, and we've all heard about how well filtering software works.

Not far behind the ISP is the telco. In my area, it's GTE. A year ago their prices were lower... it seems strange that they're increased. Unlike the ISP, at least where I live, you're stuck with your local telco. The service is Frame Relay. In Oregon, and probably in many other places, there's no room for a bargain, since the rates are set by a utility commission.

Of course, you then need equipment. I wanted a low cost Linux based solution. At the time, the only real option was Sangoma. They sell a card that goes in your PC that more or less does everything you need. The mounting bracket has one 8 pin jack (same size and shape as an 10baseT ethernet connector) but it's for a T1 line. Like ethernet, only four wires are used, a pair for transmit and a pair for receive. I'll give more details about the wiring below. You can always email me if you're trying to set it up and have a question.

Indeed it is expensive. I don't recall all the costs down to the penny, but here's more or less how it worked out:

• Setup: Samgoma card, $950
• Setup: Telco install fee, $350
• Reoccur: Telco, $123
• Reoccur: ISP, $150

Now I could go on about why I decided to spring for an expensive T1 service, but that's really getting off-topic from and already slightly off-topic post. The main point of this post was to respond with the actual costs of setting up a low speed fractional T1 service.... or at least the actual costs in my area, as they were about a year ago. A secondary purpose was to give a little bit of info about how to do it. To that end, I'll ramble on just a bit more about the setup.

I called both the ISP and the telco and asked about how to set things up. My experience was that it's better and easier to deal with the ISP. Finding a cool ISP is not easy, but they're out there. Dave at Internet Arena is a great guy, so if you're in the Portland area, I'd suggest you give Dave a call. He's got a bunch of other really high speed/moderate cost options for certain areas, using leased T1 lines instead of the telco. Anyway, the point is to talk with ISPs and make a visit to any you want to do business with.

Often times the ISP will call the telco for you to set up all the details, but you can get involved if you want. I did. Each T1 line has a circuit ID number. Your new service will get a number. When you hear your new number, be sure to write it down and don't lose it. You may never need it again, but it's a pain to find someone at the telco who knows enough to look it up if you ever have a problem with the line.

Frame Relay is a protocol, much like the ethernet 802.3 frames. Like IPv4 gives 32 bit IP addresses, frame relay provides DLCI numbers. Unlike IP, a DLCI number is a short integer which is unique only on your line. The phone company establishes Permanent Virtual Connections (PVC) through the frame relay network, by adding routes and doing who knows what else. Ultimately, the PVC will link a DLCI number (short integer) on your your circuit ID (big long number) to a DLCI number on the ISP's circuit ID. You'll probably never use the circuit ID number, but you do need to know the DLCI number to set up the sangoma card.

Since I bought my card, Sangoma has made some major improvements in the setup process (I set up another card for someone a couple months ago). The installer looks a lot like RedHat's text based installation program. It will ask you about for various bit of information, and it'll want to know about each DLCI you have. You'd probably only establish one PVC to your ISP, but it's possible to have lots of PVC to other people, all running on the same line. After the installation, each PVC will appear as an interface. I named mine "fr16", and it looks like this when I run ifconfig:

fr16 Link encap:Frame Relay DLCI HWaddr 4096
inet addr:207.149.244.8 P-t-P:207.149.244.1 Mask:255.255.255.224
UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4889031 errors:0 dropped:12 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:7655668 errors:136874 dropped:51 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:10
Interrupt:7 Base address:0x360 Memory:c00de000-c00dffff

From here it's just the usual linux routing things.

Well, that's probably enough rambling on. If anyone reading this is looking to set up a T1 service on linux, on a budget, hopefully this has helped a bit instead of just creating more confusion. It's not cheap, but also not as bad as some people make it out to be.

However, cisco may need to worry about losing market share to linux:
linux-router.org
cyclades
sangoma

I probably wouldn't use linux as a router everywhere, but it certainly makes sense in some situations. I would guess that competition from linux based routers will cause Cisco to lower the prices on their hardware, at least somewhat.

The "hacked-up" WAN Driver is actually an excellent software/hardware solution from Sangoma Technologies. I highly recommend it! Mike Thorpe www.globalmediacorp.com

I like KDE and use KDE everyday but it reminds me TOO MUCH of windoze and very little of the object oriented OS/2 I abandoned not too long ago (IMHO the BEST desktop EVER!!! X.desktop - 2nd place!) I WANT to see what gnome has to offer. This weekend I am going to upgrade my Slackware 3.5 (libc5) to Slackware 3.6 with glibc2 updates I read about from "slackware.org" and start from scratch JUST TO TRY GNOME!!!!!!!!!! I can get KDE for SCO Unix now (for our servers)
http://ftp.sco.com/skunkwar e/osr5/vols/kde-1.0-VOLS.tar Why can't I get this for Slackware LINUX?!?!?! I use Slackware in our company for our internet router with the GREAT Sangoma WAN-Pipe card, and our web server on Stronghold for Linux (migrated from SCO Unix)... I Love Linux!!!!
Sangoma!!!

Why I have to jump thru hoops to try to even attemt to get gnome to work - I dunno! But I am determined - I am a geek with power in my company! Geez - we still run OS/2 Warp 4 for customer service workstations only because of me 3 years ago! Me - Linux, however!
Enuf said! I want LINUX!!!!!

Johnny O
johnod@voicefx.com