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OS Router Challenges Proprietary Networking
Jane Walker writes "Dave Roberts talks about Vyatta's open source router and how open source technology may soon alter the landscape of enterprise networking." From the article: "Initially, we believe that the x86 PC running Vyatta -- given the range of hardware that's available in the PC world -- can basically replace the midrange of the router market; to use Cisco terminology and model numbers, simply because it's convenient shorthand, basically from the 2800 series to the 7200 series. There's a whole host of equivalent products from Nortel and Alcatel -- but essentially in that range. I wouldn't describe it as Cisco model numbers so much as T1 branch office to gigabit LAN product categories."
I love open source and all, but can a project like this really offer the same number of WIC modules?
I can plug damn near anything into a Cisco router....
Cisco and Juniper offer 24/7 worldwide support. Whether or not it sucks, this is the thing that keeps people cozily asleep at night, knowing that if they have a problem, they have an unchallengeable defense of having bought the best in class support solution (notice I avoid any discussion of h/w, because in the enterprise, h/w without support is worthless).
Yes, Vyatta talks a good game, but 24/7 worldwide support isn't something you build with a few million bucks in VC funding.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Advocate 1: "I work at Oracle by day, but work on Vyatta by night."
Advocate 2: "Well, I work at Cisco by day, but work on PostgreSQL by night"
[awkward pause]
Advocate 1: "Pistols or swords?"
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Here's why:
1) it takes an RTOS to make things work well. You can grind all the driver code you want, but an RTOS foundation is required with lots of cache
2) only PCI-X bus gets close, and most 1Us don't have it. That gives you a real ceiling in terms of port-port throughput; don't kid yourself
3) the algorithms needed to maintain cross-bar speed are gruesome. You don't find this kind of code in anything but sledge-hammered C and assembler, and code that only a mother (and an embedded systems engineer) could love. There is very little forgiveness here.
Yes, a 1U can make a decent router. But don't kid yourself into believing that you can beat F5, Cisco, Alcatel, etc.
You can certainly embarrass them, but on the high end, it doesn't work.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If you go to Vyatta's website they claim that they are bringing in the "Dawn" of Open Source Networking.
Unfortunately these folks obviously were living under a ROCK for the past 8-10 years and never noticed
things like oh.. IPTABLES, and there has been WAN support in Linux for a long time. Great companies like
Sangoma offer T1 cards etc etc. This is just a bunch of folks trying to cash in on support contracts on
the backs of great open source projects and developers. We shouldn't even be giving them the press! They
are a bunch of HACKS!
You get OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD all working in concert through the kernel. Oh and did I mention the price? $40.
Brilliant!
While this router probably will be a valid competitor to Cisco/Juniper in many areas, it probably won't be able to compete in the very high end market where these companies have made a name for themselves. Cisco routers, at least do a lot of processing using ASICs, which are specifically optimized to make the kinds of decisions needed for routing packets. I'm not sure whether traditional x86 can match that level of performance.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
I guess those BSD guys have just been playing around all these years.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
While a company such as Vyatta may be able to deliver the software to actually do the routing, you still need hardware pieces to actually connect to your equipment.
There aren't many PCI (full or half height) cards that can do ATM with OC3, etc....
Then there is the size factor. Data centre space is sparse and expensive, cisco (and such) equipment is built for this space. x86 PCs also run hotter (and louder) than specifically designed hardware from vendors such as cisco, juniper and 3com. oh and they draw more power.
i just can't see how this will take off in the top end of the market.
sure, for a small branch office that connects to frame, isdn, dsl or pstn and runs a vpn it may be fine, but not in a data centre or racked environment.
...they buy "world-class support", but having tried to use said support on occasion, I can say that I feel sorry for the world. Sure, it's better than a kick in the head, but not so much that it's worth the cost. I believe the record for longest repair ever was at the University of Manchester, in England, where a Cisco router corrupted the 1518th byte in every packet (thus only corrupting packets with a 1500 byte payload or 1496 bytes over 802.1q). Took them NINE MONTHS to fix. The first three of those, they denied there was even a problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
GateD used to be under a semi-open license. Then there was MRTD, Zebra and Quagga. XORP is said to be pretty good, too. MIT's Click is probably the most versatile, as you can just about script your own routing elements - very pluggable - with the added capability of routing between physical and simulated (eg: NS-2) networks.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
like India or China, 24/7 cya support is much less important, because you're economy is growing fast enough that you can recover from a meltdown, if only by starting a new company.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I seem to recall my first home broadband connection used a 386, running Freesco linux from a floppy. The next one was a 486 running smoothwall linux with transparent squid web caching (because I found a CD drive in the trash).
All on junk hardware picked out of dumpsters (well, OK, I had to buy the cable modem I admit).
I'm sure you can't route six dozen T1s with complex firewall rules and packet mangling on a 486, but you can do anything a Cisco 2500 series could do, and you can still do QOS, NAT, firewalling, etc. etc. etc. using more recent dumpster hardware. PCs running tuned linux or BSD kernels work great for anything but ISP-grade stuff.
And this company will sell you open-source routers suitable for small ISPs, too.
Wake me up when the hype is over.
Wow can we say blatant ripoff of JunOS
the command structure is the same..
... interesting article on TechWorld: A reality check for open source routing.
My former employer is using three relatively simple Tyan dual Xeons with a couple of Syskonnekt cards to shove 4-5 gigabits per second of traffic over the internet (yes, full routing, and over 240 peers on AMS-IX and NL-IX). Most of that is usenet (http://www.top1000.org/top1000.current.txt look for 'tweaknews') but well over a gigabit is DSL end user traffic and some hosting. Those boxes cost in the order of 7000 euro's a piece, and are about as stable as a cisco running an current IOS (not as stable as you'd like). 7 grand buys me a single linecard for a 7200 on the secondhand market, and no 7200 will do as much traffic.
Cisco and Juniper: start getting scared *now*
Reading from a distance, I thought that said VISTA, not Vyatta :)
I was starting to think that Vista had lost so many features that the only thing it was good for was for setting up a really, really expensive router.
There are several other OSS solutions that can do this.
But good luck getting support at 1:30 am when the thing goes wierdo on you and you need to reboot the thing, 500 miles away..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So i was reading over the documentation for this product, what a headache, looks like it was to be just like cisco in the command line.
for anything low range to enterprise level, I dont understand why they would choose this product over openbsd.
Configuring firewall rulesets for this software is just silly, whereas pf is nice and intuitive and actually makes sense.
Nice idea, but again i agree with the earlier post about port -> port speeds in high end/enterprise applications, you're going to have some difficulty finding something as powerful as a cisco/juniper/whatever that will fit into a 1U space.
Just in case anyone was wondering, there are other routers that are open source. I think all of Netgears routers firmware is open.
Or a large businesses data center.
Don't kid yourself into thinking FreeSCO or IPcop, or monowall, etc can hold up with the big boys.. Sure, home, small and ( perhaps ) medium businesses could get away with it, but not the high end needs a of a large company. Between speed, and size and heat and support of the pc that can get the job done *reliably* its best to stick with the ciscos of the world in that case.
Be careful who you say is pushing the hype..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
who the hell modded this up? the routers described in the article and the pissweak nat-in-a-boxes that parent speaks of are so dissimilar it's not funny. -1, clueless idiot talking about things he knows nothing about
If Vyatta is the "dawn of open source networking" then who the hell are these guys?
Bullshit. Even a 200 MHz MIPS chip gives pretty shitty routing performance -- just look at a WRT54G router. Mine goes up to 100% cpu usage with a single SIP call. That router of yours would choke if you had more than one or two users or you were running BitTorrent or something. A Cisco 2500 won't. That's the real difference.
Not many people are going to run out and implement this. That's OK as long as there is some group of users who are over or under served by Cisco. In that case this could be a disruptive technology. Disruptive technologies start in niches of the market that the market leader doesn't care about (maybe in the third world for instance). The technology develops to the point where more and more users are attracted to it. The market leader retreats up-market where the big profits are anyway. Eventually, the disruptive technology becomes good enough to meet the needs of the top end of the market and the old market leader is finished.
Granted this OS router seems a bit lame right now but I wouldn't write them off forever.
Yes, it's nice to exercise code. A nice $1K router can be had for about $45 in the form of a Linksys home router with some nice kits put on them. Not the fastest, but if you're connecting to a GBE or fiber connection, then you need some speed. All else has as the least common denominator-- the mating link speed. This is usually something ugly like several Ts or at most a DS3. Few orgs get nice fast connection speeds so one is gilding the lilly to think otherwise.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
500-1.2 g machines from VIA are good enough for 100 speed networking with Linux installed on them.
1000 speed networking 2g machines become a requirement. Still dual processor VIA chips will hold this without much problem. These chips don't get that hot and parts are simple to replace. Ok if your using AMD or INTEL standard chips yes problem.
10000 Cisco the big boys. Nothing I know of has the heat low enough other than custom hardware. I don't know where sparcs fit here. Never checked there thermal. Even this level might be takable.
Not alot of companys use 10000. Cost verse access to parts. VIA wins for most of the low end routers. AMD and Intel need to release even if slow cold processors. Ie processors that don't need heat sinks to compete in this market. So adding a heat sink is over kill and makes sure the processor cannot over heat.
I recently looked into building a PC based router after our NPE-300 board in our Cisco 7206VXR started flaking out.
While I'm sure it can be done for a T1, you sure as heck aren't going to build an effective DS3 or higher router on a PC.
The biggest problem right now is lack of PCI ATM adapters. I recently had CDW look into this for us. Apparently IBM used to make an ATM adapter, and HP currently does but is only supported for HPUX.
As much as the hacker in me would love to put together a DS3 capable, PC based router running Linux, without proper hardware and driver support, it's just not going to happen right now.
But hey, I hope I'm wrong... If someone can point me in the direction of an ATM adapter with Linux support, great ! I'll start hacking away... Until then, I'll sleep soundly at night knowing that if something blows up and it's an emergency situation, Cisco will ship out parts by start of next business day, in a worse case scenario.
We (by that I mean geeks in the networking world) have been doing this for years...
Why can't we think of ways to profit from this as these companies do??
Damn, should have gone back and gotten that MBA...
I'm pretty sure the $45 Linksys routers (and they're more like $70 now, for the ones you can flash the firmware on and have a significant amount of RAM: the "54GL") don't have GigE on the LAN side; I think they top out at 100BT. So if you just want an uplink router, they're probably fine once you get them patched up to your liking, but if you want your local net to be fast, they're not going to cut it.
A router with GigE on the LAN switch and a reasonably fast uplink, and configurable software (not a braindead web interface) is going to put you into the low end of 'real routers' I think, or at least on the very high end of consumer plastic-boxes.
While I think the guy in the article was engaging in a certain amount of hubris when he compared their "softrouter" to something like the Cisco 7200-series, I do think there's a potential market in between the upper end of the current SOHO routers and switches, and the bottom end of the enterprise market. A powerful, fast router that was easy to use (for someone coming from SOHO boxes) but which offered expandability and the ability to grow with a not-so-small-anymore business, could find a healthy niche.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I checked their web site and can't find the source. They're using GPL code and heavily advertising "Open Source." So where's the source?
Yeah... you can do some heavy duty routing on a 2514... what with the 10 mbit ethernet interfaces and all.... NOT.
A cisco 2500 will lock up hard and require rebooting when faced with even piddly amounts of traffic. They are complete shite. At least low end junipers and high end ciscos reboot instead of locking up when they have to do real work. Off the shelf servers have been EASILY able to replace cisco/juniper gear at 20 times the price for years.
A PC platform will not scale like a decent router will. The memory latency becomes the bottleneck once you start thrashing your CPU cache when you have a lot of routes or ACLs. For small setups, it might work, but it will not compete with dedicated hardware solutions once the complexity grows.
I have implemented routers, and the biggest bottleneck is typically memory latency. Once the routing tables grow beyond what will fit in the cache, the latency kills you. Dedicated hardware routers are designed with this in mind, often with multiple banks of low-latency memory or CAMS.
Try to handle 1M packets per second with 100K routes, MPLS VPNs, ACLs, policy based routing, QoS, policing, marking, reverse path forwarding checks, etc. and it will fall apart. Plus it has to keep statistics on everything. All of that will quickly exceed the memory bandwidth available on any PC platform.
A decent router can do all of this and run at gigabit speeds or more. Add to that all the various interfaces that are available and the much higher port densities.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Techtarget's article is the equivalent of Father and Son at the baseball field. Dad throws 'em nice and slow, and Junior hits 'em every time.
To call this "press" is an insult to news media everywhere, even by their standards. This is nothing more than a fluff piece by Techtarget (and Techtarget isn't "media"; they're basically a "whitepaper rehasher") asking him exactly what he wants to be asked.
Please help metamoderate.
Can it understand a text file full of Cisco IOS commands as its config file?
Or do I have to learn yet another Martian language's arcane vocabulary and obtuse syntax to be able to program it?
I already went thru hell to learn Cisco's brain-hurting IOS.... I don't want to learn another.
The first Juniper routers were "Olives", which were PC's running modified BSD. JUNOS is BSD based.
UUNET, IMHO the greatest ISP ever, first tested them in 1998 or 1999. CISCO had annoyed UUNET with poor service, so UUNET helped bring Juniper into the market. Yes, I am former UUNET and proud of it.
I found an interesting link to Olives at http://juniper.cluepon.net/index.php/Olive.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
This keeps coming up every 6 months or so. To rehash it for you:
...... AND you want to save $30k by using a #@$%#$%#$% software router running on a DELL?????
1) performance wise a 6x PCI-X motherboard is rare and commodity computers are not built for the buses to independantly talk to each other without invoking cpu.
2) feature wise you Have to have a RTOS or bad things happen when you try to implement QOS. speaking of features they have libraries full of books that talk about the *thousands* of features technologies that real routers implement (its hard to do that most companies spend tens/hundreds of millions to do this). implementing a few protocols/nat/firewall does not a router make.
3) If you actually have been involved with these things you would know:
-ds3/oc3/oc12's are not cheap... phone company bills of $100k a *month* is very common.
-a couple network engineers $100k/year each
-dedicated power/colo space/ups/generators $50+k/year
-SLA's and peering arraingment... $$$
-uptime to your customers measured in seconds of uptime (revenue $200+k/MONTH).
really, try explaining that to the CEO after the site has lost $10k/HOUR because something wonky is going on with the cpu or the memory oorrr it could be the kernel, I dunno I just rebooted the thing "cuz that usually fixes MY problems"... bye bye SLA.
--jboss
It'll never, EVER challenge Cisco in the big iron market. Why? Simple. No IT manager has EVER been fired for buying Sun servers, Cisco routers/switches, or IBM PCs. Big iron isn't about open source. Big iron is about triple-redundant reliability, service contracts, and brand trust.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Sometimes purpose built products simply make more sense. Lets skip the obvious reasons like tested, reliable (hardware) platforms, extensive QA, depending on the user-base even more extensive discovery and bug reporting.
:) I walk past racks everyday and you can see the people who spend the money to do things right (standardized hardware, good cable management, serious components, nicely organised) and the people who cut corners, because the people who cut corners are the ones who are there, fixing problems while that rack of X4100's with the database using the dual-channel fiber interconnects and the managed gigabit switches and the shiny firewall appliance just kind of clicks along.
:)
Na, lets forget about the piddly stuff. I work at a systems admin: do you really want to build a product without the aforementioned benifits (hey, your production systems is now doing beta testing!) and take the heat for to save a few dollars?
Sure, I'm sure it works pretty good. It might even be the perfect solution for a lot of scenarios. But when you build off a non-supported OSS projects *you* become support. *You* take the blame. If my Cisco router goes south (not that I've ever had that happen) I call technical support and no matter how little my CEO might know about hardware its now *Ciscos* problem.
That said we do use a lot of OSS software, even in production, but where I feel strongly about 'appliances' is in task-specific applications, ie: router ios's, loadbalancers, firewalls, switches (sure, as in routers).
Besides, any of you who work as system admins know that Radware hardware has more bling.
If that sounds like a rant its only because we've cut some of these corners and I've had to work pretty hard to start getting things turned back around (commodity desktop building oem server vendor > specialized oem server vendor (the kind that knows what Linux is and installs and burns in your OS) > Sun/Dell/HP/[Insert favorite vendor here]) all the while convincing the company I work for that saving a few dollars to build a firewall on last gen hardware didn't make as much sense as buying a documented, supports and stable 'boxed' firewall. Not to mention the rest of the network. So ya, I'm a little bitter.
Quack, quack.
Did I say IPV6? Shame on me.
It would be nice to have need for internal routers for many of the tasks that people think they need routers for. Yes, a fatuous ARP table is a beautiful thing if the router can deal with other things. There's a tremendous amount of power in pushing the routing/bridging strength to the edge, and keeping the height low on the hierarchical models; it's more manageable.
But the little stupid brouters (GBE switches at this rate) are really nice. Add in some nice filtration tables to keep 0wn3d machines off the backbone and life is good. So the eBay cost is dirt for a Linksys, or by a DLink or Netgear or SMC or who cares programmable router. For 1/10th of the effort required to get this other stuff compiled and stable, you can take what's already there and have lunch instead of debugging maniacal routing code that's trying to be stapled into a 1U.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Might as well pick choose your own professional consultant rather than get stuck with some indians answering phones for a big router company. Is this really hard to see?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
A Cisco 2500 won't? Are you kidding? The 2500 is the most ancient piece of shit around. I simply can't believe people still use them. What is it about a 20MHz 68030 that makes you think it'll beat a 133MHz MIPS, let alone a 200MHz MIPS processor? Sure, some of the software releases from Linksys might have performance problems, well most of their releases do. I think you'll find that the 2500 keels over far sooner than processor with 10 times the speed, given decent software. I think that happens somewhere between 4 and 8 simultaneous voice calls.
It's very parallel in it's nature in that a small networking company could present this as a cost effective option. I see how a small networking consultant company could actually push this towards the small business level. But I'm doubtful it could ever be presented at the public/community level for use in schools or public wi-fi rest areas when the state lays out stipulations regarding only accepting bids from Cisco based numbers and Cisco certified installers? More or less, mandating that tax payer investment for this massive scalability be present. Often times, in these areas, that is ten-fold overkill. So there is the need, but I'm afraid that Cisco's name is so far embedded in corporate and state america, it's going to be a tall order to ever penetrate that market. Bringing this comment back to the small business. If a consultant can convince the client that this is a viable router to placing thier 20-something client station network on, then, yes, it has a niche.
The common responses on here seem to revolve around the inability of PC hardware to handle high bandwidth. To an extent this is necessarily true. A general purpose PC is going to rely on its CPU to handle each packet traversing the box. Processors are fast and cheap and becoming faster and cheaper as time passes. Most commercial router vendors realized quite a while ago that any architecture whose perforance is based on a single, centrl CPU inherently represents an eventual bottleneck and thus a serious challenge to scalability. As such, most commercial routers have moved to a model where forwarding is pushed as far as possible from a control plane that is as discrete as possible.
In other words, if we push the actual heavy lifting of forwarding out to distributed components (e.g. the interfaces themselves) then we're no longer left in a situation where our BGP process is vying for cycles and memory access with packets in transit. When properly implemented this means that I can be moving huge amounts of traffic through my router without interrupting network control traffic, management of the box, etc, etc.. It also means that by distributing packet switching they can hit massive performance levels with a comparitively modest CPU.
At the high end with Cisco and Juniper you're paying for the development of some exotic ASIC's and some even more exotic interface hardware. You're also paying for the capability to support high density - PC platforms aren't going to support tens of 10G or hundreds of 1G interfaces any time soon. The capacity for redundant CPU's, stateful failover, etc is also worth remembering.
At every level of Cisco and Juniper hardware you're paying for the ongoing development and maintenance of a highly complex codebase full of features that just aren't practical (or, in some situations, possible) for the OSS community to implement well. Implicit in this is a huge system test and regression faculty.
I've used and deployed open source routers up to OC3 bandwidth. They worked and, for the most part, worked well when faced with relatively simple networking tasks - multihoming enterprises to the Internet, basic WAN routing, etc. My observation has been that these platfoms start to fall apart when faced with requirements for complex routing policies, fancy QoS, MPLS, etc.
There's a definite place in the world for PC-based open source routing platforms - particularly at the edge of larger networks or in the midst of small and medium sized ones but I don't think Cisco and Juniper need to worry about being rendered completely obsolete any more than Oracle needs to worry about being driven completely out of business by MySQL or PG.
It's an interesting idea, and all but the troll comments are to the point and even trolls are perceptive.
Most seem to be missing an important point. What's the company's business model? Free software with tech support for $500 per year? That's not a billion dollar idea. How about the point made that they intend to offer appliances and system blueprints?
So, it's not really about reusing your old PCs, except for really small companies, start-ups or 3rd worlders. Vyatta readily admits that ultimate performance and absolute reliability does require very careful selection of components and careful engineering. Can it be done with OTS components? I think so.
The product is essentially a Linux Kernel with a routing stack designed to run on an X86 processor based platform. Almost every network appliance I've studied over the past decade has been based upon the same concept. It's a recognized commodity HW plan, one that most companies are comfortable with, even if they're not aware of it.
The question is whether they can produce appliances and reference platforms (tested HW configs) that can be replicated and whether these devices can be sold for less than what a "Name Brand" router costs on E-Bay.
Wideband makes Layer-3 switches that beat comparable Cisco routers hands down. With their nMU (pronounced "NetMU") it makes easy things easy and difficult things easy too. With their 28-port switches, you can get full-duplex, non-blocking Gigabit transfers on all ports simultaneously. And did I mention that they can even do Gigabit over CAT-3 and barbed wire? Also, if you use the nMU control your switches, none of them even need IP addresses. Good luck trying to hax0r a switch with no IP address. Throw in the fact that all their stuff is made in the USA (no off-shore customer support) and costs much less than comparable Cisco gear that doesn't perform nearly as well, and you have yourself a superior product. If you are expanding or replacing your network infrastructure, consider WideBand over Cisco. You'll be glad you did.
***Disclaimer***
I do not now, nor have I ever worked for WideBand, but we use their gear where I work. BTW, there were some guys who ran a Cisco shop in the training class I was in that WideBand offered. Last I heard, they were replacing all their switches with WideBand gear. IMNSHO, WideBand is the best kept secret in networking
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
ten cheap PCs running heartbeat & STONITH are more reliable than any single box, period. And cheaper than equivalent hardware.
Learn the RAID lesson, dude.
Consider WideBand instead of Cisco. Their Gold Support is so good, that often the first you hear of a problem is an e-mail from them notifying you that they fixed it. And since they're 100% American made and supported, you'll never call and talk to someone who barely speaks English. No, I don't now nor have I ever worked for them. We just use thier products and couldn't be happier.
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
I recall F5's BigIP Pro back in the late 90s. A really nice slick purple and silver box. Big "F5" on the front. Opened the $25+K box up and lo and behold - a P2-233. Oh, and that box was precisely what you think it was now that you know what was in it. A $25K boat anchor. (apoligies to respectable boat anchors everywhere).
I've heard recently that new deployments of F5's products still suffer some of the same faults we ran across in 99.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
MS advocate: I work on .Net, MSMQ, SQL and Windows Vista by the day...
OS Advocate: Any by the night???
MS advocate: Oh nothing.. I just Update, patch, reinstall and reboot.
OS Advocate: What is reboot?
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"Never do it in software, if you can do it hardware".
Just adding to all the other replies that talked about bandwidth, etc. etc.
Support. You gotta have support. I dont care HOW good this thing has the potential to be, unless I can call an engineer 24/7 including christmas, I wouldn't even let it in the building.
Its like choosing MySQL or MS-SQL over Oracle, yeah it may cost you less upfront, but your going to pay in the end.
I had an oracle server just go completely brain dead. I called Oracle support at 4:30pm, on a Thursday. I was talking to the Denver support Center. Now Denver closed at 8pm, central time. I was still on the phone with an engineer at closing. The very nice lady says, "Ok its closing time and I have to go get my kids, so I have Sam on the line, he is in England, he will be taking it from here, I have briefed him on everything we have done." so on with Sam from England I went. When England closed down, I was shifted to China, then to Australia. When the problem was finally solved, I was talking to California.
This is why when your IP throughput to your customers is worth 30 or 40 thousand dollars a minute, you dont screw around, you pay the money for the best combination of hardware / support you can afford. I could care less if under the hood they are running a linux, Novell, M$ or Apple kernel, its just has to work, and when it doesn't the support just has to be there 24/7.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
When I trained at Juniper Networks' Denver office in December 2001, they had stacks of Olives in the training room, and that's what we used to test commands on. :)
Loved them. But the trainer told us at the start not to ask for a tarball
Does it run FreeBSD?
My guess is 80% of the folks here think a power tool is a cordless screwdriver for taking PC cases off :-)
Someone had to do it.
I had some experience with Olives as well. However, their performance wasn't that great. Especially compared to a M10. ASICs made a huge difference.
I see a good number of posts advocating that ASICs do a better job, are more optimised, memory bandwidth limitations/latencies etc.... I've been there and done that in terms of building a commercial software router running on standard x86 platforms and customised x86 platforms. Products like the CISCO 3845 ISR reach upto 600K packets per second raw forwarding and dip drastically in performance when ACLs, QoS etc are enables. Even for 1500B packets, these routers cannot sustain line rates for ACLs on 2 gig-ethernet interfaces bi-directional. On a standard x86 server board running on Opteron 2GHz, a software router was able to outstrip the CISCO 3845 by 70% and retain performance with ACLs thereby making it more than twice as fast. Mind you, this was on a $1000 server hardware from a well known serverv vendor. I'd expect the OFR to do atleast 70-80% as well. Nothing can stand greater testimony than this to the fact that x86 hardware can deliver performance.
You can easily route 5 T1's on a Thrown away 586MMX at 266Mhz.
I did it for 6 years with a hand rolled linux install and ipchains. IT was faster than the HP 6 port router it replaced in both speed and network performance and adding in some filtering gave us a product that sould have cost $6000 at the time from the New Cisco company or then popular Colorado networking.
Every single one of these guys here claiming that no way a PC can route much traffic knows absolutely nothing about networking and routers. Hell a cheap P4-2.8 with the right hardware can route ATM speeds over ethernet easily (Yes kids, you can get ethernet termination on anything from your provider).
Hell a slow 386 can do a single T1 without getting about 5% processor loads.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
/me disappears in a puff of absurd.
I have a WRT54G right here, and there are two persons with bittorrent right now.
As for pc's, I have a 1300-user network with *lots* of bittorrent-users in it, all behind 8 pc's (P-IV, granted).
Segmentation fault. Ore dumped.
Imagestream - HA! Now, there is a joke!
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A company run from the basement of one of their mother's houses? I've been there and these guys are not worth your time. Check out their corporate headquarters location and tell me this is for real: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=7900+8th+
Also, taking open source and then closing it and turning it into a prorietary router != OSS!
For Vyatta, it looks like they have a real company, a real location, a real management team and the code is available here: http://www.vyatta.com/twiki/bin/view/Community/So
For a midrange router with a few FE ports I might give them a shot.
Let's not confuse "sometimes things don't work as expected" with "it never works! it's a disaster!!11!L".
:), every single one has been solved efficiently and with serious concern for the customer. P1s that lasted more than a few days came with every morning conference calls with my tac engineers giving me status.
:)
I'm not the biggest cisco fan in the world, and given sufficient quantities of beer, i can tell dozens of stories of how cisco couldn't or wouldn't fix a particular problem. We even have a free router because it was easier to just give us a different router where the problem didn't happen than fix it on the platform we bought.
But keep this in mind: We have a free router because it fixed the problem. And for every "this is the stupidest support story ever", the bottom line is ALWAYS it was a p3 or p4 issue. Something annoying but we could live with it if my primary goal at work wasn't to solve or whine away every obstacle to the utopian network.
Every P1 or P2 issue i've ever reported, and my CCO account is long and has many notes about my character i'm not allowed to read
Cisco provides good software (with bugs), good support (with bugs), and sells it using people (good grief, they're buggy). And we, the end users, are often buggy too, which needs to be kept in mind as well.
An open source router sounds nice for the times you're building a small business that has no money to buy something expensive (or a business reason to do so). I'm not going to waste my time bashing it, it's just that it doesn't fit into what I do.
When I run into a problem where a cam table is corrupted with a particular rediclously contrived but business critical data stream, I need it fixed and I need it fixed fast, and I'm not paid to decode and rewrite layer 2 forwarding to PCI-X interfaces. So for me? It's just not right.
And dude, don't get me started on running gigabit over cat 3...
Umm, let's see. Intuitive?
Cisco IOS
Shutdown a port:
MyRouter#config
MyRouter(config)#interface ethernet 1/1
MyRouter(config-if)#shutdown
MyRouter(config-if)#Z
MyRouter#
Enable a port:
MyRouter#config
MyRouter(config)#interface ethernet 0/0
MyRouter(config-if)#NO shutdown
MyRouter(config-if)#Z
MyRouter#
Boy, that's intuitive!
Now for that wild, byzantine Linux command shell interface:
Shutdown a port:
MyHost# ifdown eth0
Enable a port:
MyHost# ifup eth0
Oops - forgot to show the command to get to "command mode", i.e. - root privelege:
Myhost$ su
Password: xxxxx
MyHost# ifup eth1
MyHost# exit
MyHost$
Thank God Cisco's IOS is soooo much more intuitive than the Linux/bash command shell!!!
In IOS, you don't "enable" a port, you just don't shut it down! How intuitive!
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Google is your friend.
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
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.
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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/t1
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.
Even 5 years ago, there was decent kit on the market.
But you have to distinguise here, there are people that want to use stuff. And there are people that want to build stuff from old PC's. And since they apparently need a way to boots their Alpha Geek status they make up this story about their solution being "better" than what you can buy of the shelf...