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XORP 1.0 Released
Mark Handley writes "XORP is the eXtensible Open Router
Platform - an open-source router software stack for FreeBSD and Linux.
It's designed from scratch to be extensible, so you can write your own
router applications that play nicely with the existing routing
protocols. We just released XORP 1.0! There's also a Live CD if you want to try
it out without reinstalling your machine. More details in this CNET article."
But this is good for colleges and other places where the concentration of "guys who can stop by and fix the router" is high. Also not to mention the tinfoil factor of a readonly-livecd router (but does it have remote logging).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Ironic that there is no mention of Quagga or Zebra (that I can see) in either the XORP website, or the CNET article.
Zebra has been around for a long time now, and is pretty good. Due to the slow release cycle, Quagga forked the codebase, and so there are updated releases. Unfortunately neither project has seen fit to hit the magic 1.0 release.
- Ivan
The code/API does not seem to be designed to close to the ucLinux style of coding. While it's a commendable idea to reuse lowend hardware, it's a little heavy on the resources for a "real" device-based router project. Do the XORP web admins know when the code has been downloaded by half the Taiwanese broadband router companies yet? :P
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
The cost of traditional routers has been a problem for commercial and non commercial organisations with tight budgets. Even in larger organisations with considerable routing investment there can be a real lack of routers for spares and training.
Add to this the fact that some old but worthy routers may not run the latest IOS and hence may have some unpatched vulnerability, which will not be addressed by the manufacturer, who understandably wants you to buy their latest kit.
As the CNET article points out the perceived disadvantage of this open source router software is the performance of the physical platform.
Perhaps it is the hardware implimentation that made people unsure of the Open Router project?
Perhaps a respectable router can be built more easily and for less outlay now than 5 years ago?
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
How am I supposed to know if it's any good if there are no screenshots?
Gated got a mention in the CNET article. It was actually a very good alternative to the commercial vendor hardware - argueably many ISPs (that are around today, eg Demon Internet in the UK) would never have been able to start up if it were not for the existance of Gated.
:(
Unfortunately this was an example of a kinda BSD-style licence causing problems. The Gated community (which cost a couple of thousand pounds per year to join, providing access to all code/updates) added a great deal of functionality to the code, and benefited from this.
The whole code was subsequently taken and "owned" by NextHop, meaning most/all of these code benefits were lost. Take a look at the gated.org website to see what happened
- Ivan
There's also Quagga, a fork of the GNU Zebra (thanks Kunihiro), which is further along, more mature, in much wider use than XORP (I've not heard of anyone actually using XORP in production, while GNU Zebra and Quagga most definitely are) and, most importantly, not written in C++ ;).
NB: I'm biased.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
This is plenty fast enough for most edge routers, but clearly not going to compete with a Cisco CRS-1 or Juniper core router.
But most of the software in a router is control-plane (routing protocols and the like) and this is what XORP has focussed on to-date. As more people get involved with the project, we'll be able to do more things.
A decade ago no-one thought we'd be running Linux on a supercomputer. But we are. If we can get to the point where XORP is stable enough and fully featured enough for carrier-grade routers, who knows what hardware people will run it on in a few years time.
We are however very committed to keeping XORP as an open-source platform. No matter who uses it commercially, in the long run the only way to open up the router software market is for many boxes from many vendors to run a common open base software platform. With luck and with a lot of help, maybe that can be XORP.
- Mark Handley, XORP Project
www.xorp.org is in California, www2.xorp.org is in London. Both are 6-year old dual 450MHz Xeon machines with 768MBytes of RAM and SCSI disks, running FreeBSD and Apache 1.3.x. Both machines have 100Mb/s access to the Internet.
In 5 hours:
www.xorp.org: transfered ~30 GBytes peaked at around 175 simultaneous httpd processes 15 min load average peaked at 0.7. www2.xorp.org: transfered ~20 GBytes peaked at around 75 simultaneous httpd processes 15 min load average peaked at 0.4. Aggregate bandwidth was ~25Mbit/sec average. I won't know the peak bandwidth without some more analysis, but it's obviously quite a bit more than 25Mb/s. I didn't notice any obvious slowdown on either machine.I've no idea how typical this is, but I'm always curious about how easily sites seem to die due to slashdotting.
- Mark
If it was a BSD license it couldn't have been taken over. A BSD license can get a commercial fork, but the original code remains freely redistributable.