Slashdot Mirror
Linux To Power Super Router
VE3OGG writes "While Cisco might not be shaking in its multi-billion dollar booties, a couple of network experts have decided to see if they can come up with a possible alternative to Cisco. Termed 'Open Linux Router,' and joining such other ambitious projects as the Extensible Open Router Platform (XORP), the Open Linux Router project aims to compete in the realms of Cisco routers and PBX. Some of the features include SSL web interface, serial console, wireless support, VLAN support, and packet filtering."
A 14 year old kid put linux on a pentium 2 he bought for 20 dollars and is running it as an open-source router.
its a laugh. They think of competing with the big boys. Cisco provides KILLER hardware and software. Even if they provide the killer hardware, they're still killing themselves for not using FreeBSD + pf like what is located in PFsense.
Again, a better router solution... PFsense (FreeBSD + PF)
PF is worlds better than Netfilter, and understandable too. Netfilter is the perl of firewalls.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
I was expecting to read about a router that could compete with Cisco's hardware based on performance, not features. It looks like an interesting project for smaller shops or routing applications that aren't business critical... maybe more of a competitor to low end routers and all-in-one appliances, not enterprise routers. It doesn't look like it has any stateful failover capabilities.
At the first ISP i worked for back in 1996 they were not using cisco at all they were using solaris to route everything, i dont know how they set it all up though, but this isnt a new idea, maybe just newer software for it.
Just my 2 cents worth
It's tested, mature .. forked and works well with a number or protocols.
http://www.quagga.net/
The website of this wonderul "Super Router" is http://www.openlinuxrouter.com/
It's a bullshit news - there is NOTHING DONE YET. The project is IN PLANS and I don't know how it could be better than e.g. m0n0wall [1] or Lintrack [2]
[1] http://m0n0.ch/wall/
[2] http://www.lintrack.org/
For what it's worth, Linux already powers all the NetGear DG routers at least(Wireless, LAN) etc, and I have to say they work very well.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Is it a hub? Is it a switch? No! It's ...
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
Using Linux to power the control plane of the router is the easy part. Designing the ASICs, programming the FPGAs, and writing the hardware drivers is the hard part. High-end routers don't process packets with software routines; it's done with very fast, specialized hardware. And you want your control plane to be as lightweight as possible, both to control software defects and to improve performance.
But does it...doh!
When I read the summary I thought they'd be competing with Cisco's service provider grade box http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5763/index.h tml
Guess they'll need to come up with some pretty fast interfaces b/c I dunno if Frys/CompUSA carries OC-192/768 interfaces for the PC.
Sounds like another LEAF project http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
Make all the features you do have work well. That's one thing I have to give Cisco gear, whatever features they choose to include on a given system, they all work. Often times their smaller stuff is much less feature complete than OSS equivalents but it all works. I use m0n0wall at home because I want a little, embedded firewall and I'd like features I don't feel like paying for on a Cisco for a home network (though I'm going to have to take a real look at the new ASAs). However I've continually had to fight with m0n0wall over getting stuff it has to work. There's been bugs, and there's a number of features that are called "advanced" and "unsupported" which is apparently code for "We can't figure out how to make it work right so we are going to blame the problem on you and refuse to help."
What makes Ciscos "super" isn't their feature list, it is that they work WELL. Performance, stability, etc, all are great. IOS may make the easy things more difficult than perhaps they need to be but it makes the difficult stuff possible.
Also if you asked me the name is really misleading. The name and description implies that it'd be competing against the high end stuff, spicily IOS XR. However reading a little further it is just something else for making a desktop PC in to a router which competes maybe against their mid-low range gear.
If you dig around in Cisco's acquisitions a few years ago, you will notice that they bought a company that was doing a Linux based enterprise router that was the equivalent of their IOS routers. I am NOT referring to Linksys. They have a Linux group that is keeping parity with the IOS offerings just in case they need to compete with someone else's Linux based routers. When I worked at Cisco, it was a topic of rather heated discussion. It's not something Cisco plans on ever releasing unless they need to blow a potential competitor out of the water.
Free / open / alternative systems and routers may come out. Companies, especially larger ones, will still gladly purchase "authentic Cisco" products. When they buy Cisco, it may cost a lot, it may even be a rip off - but its still an established product from and established company. There is plenty of documentation and support for the product.
Like so many people are - interchangable with the term/idea 'Open Source'.
2 examples:
Open Source Development Labs - Not open source, just Linux. (And they are changing their name to be something Linux now)
"The Web Server is Linux" - No, the web server is Apache.
The author is being loose with words - just like so many before. If one has a problem, then go yell at the others before who mis-use what "Linux" means.
We've had a huge number of problems with Cisco's stuff, and unfortuantely are basically locked into Cisco for everything.
/different/, /conflicting/ versions of Java - one may require 1.4 and nothing else will work, another will require 1.5... and nothing else will work. (Fortuantely they're getting away from Java for their web-based front ends and just going with straight web pages).
Cisco IOS is badly fragmented across Cisco's different product lines. Entire command sets are different for no easily acceptable reason (i.e. commands that do the same thing are named different, or have their parameters in a different order, or a different format). Their SNMP support is absolutely pathetic (no Q-BRIDGE-MIB on anything, they use idiotic community indexing, SNMPv3 has more bugs than I care to think about (contexts (which they use for community indexing in SNMPv3) barely work, and you can't wildcard them).
Their software-only platforms are almost as bad. ACS is notorious for having absolutely no useful diagnostics. (Someone can't authenticate against your LDAP server? Good luck figuring out why...) CallManager isn't quite so bad, except its backup software locks up every week or so and keeps future backups from running until we get in and kill the task. All their Java interfaces require
Their hardware is OBSCENELY expensive. Our pricing is under NDA, but its still stupid, stupid expensive.
Their technical support is horrid - we groan every time we have to open a TAC case cause we know we're going to waste at least two hours with some idiot before we finally get bumped to someone who actually knows what all the funny little acryonyms in our cases stand for. We have been flat out lied to by TAC on numerous cases, as well.
But, they're Cisco, and the Powers That Be know the word "Cisco", and have seen it around a while, so we go with it.
Although not done with linux (its bsd) pfsense has most of those listed features. Ive been running it for a while and have zero issues with maintenence or performance. Was previously running a smoothwall but it would occasionally require reboots and also timed out sometimes with over 10k concurrent connections.(think torrent traffic)
Repeat after me, it is the hardware that makes CISCO untouchable by software on a PC. The ASICs, the switch fabric on the interfaces, etc etc.
It seems every few months another group gets together and say the same thing... "Surely us uber linux doods can make a better product than CISCO."
Not to say it can't happen, it just will take a bit more capitalization than these guys have.
And since this talk of "SUPER ROUTER", why not compare to Cisco's IOX?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Yeah, but does it run --
Oh.
Well then, I guess we're all set here. Someone else wanna take over, maybe throw in an "all your base" or "Beowulf cluster" reference?
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
I liked mikrotik from the time i started using it, but what really cinched it for me was this:
after a few months of using at the borders of my office lan ad getting used to its policy based everything, i called up our hoting provider to ask them to make achange to the production PIX
We had people scraping our site and wanted to redirect them to a static site. Outright blocking them would tip them off more quickly (abd obviously) to the change.
I asked our provider to set the NAT on the firewall to forward packets to host B for these particular douchebags, and host A for the rest of the world. My PIX knowledge was so rusty, and this bargain-basement routerOS box did it so readily, that it never crossed my mind that the PIX woulnd't do it.
Sure enough, "uhh... yeah this box won't NAT to different addresses based on the source IP."
me: but..but.. my $40 firewall does it!
*sigh*
the biggest thing missing form RouterOS is decent failover. can't someone port CARP linux already?
Wouldn't OpenBSD be better suited than Linux? Not looking to start a flamewar here, but what with PF and OpenBGPD et al...
Just a thought.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.