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."
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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();
OpenBSD has had stateful failover for a while now.
Failover Firewalls with OpenBSD and CARP
PF: Firewall Redundancy with CARP and pfsync
I agree with you, that it is the hardware of the "big boys" that makes their toys useful. An actual switch that ran linux/bsd would be an interesting item.
If the govt becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law, it invites man to become his own law, it invites anarchy
No, you just made it clear that you have no idea what you're talking about. The Solaris machine was likely used to monitor the routes, not to do the actual routing.
Check out Sixnet, which makes routers with all those features (minus wireless), and they run linux. (I work there)
I do like Quagga very much. But, its performance still doesn't quite match the Enterprise Cisco router. That said, Quagga works very well for small to medium sized businesses and Quagga may even outperform the lower end Cisco routers. The enterprise Cisco router has a slight advantage in that its hardware and architecture are designed for purely routing. I was bummed to find out that there was a performance gap. A Canadian University, University of Toronto, has a routing cluster based on Quagga. The administrator, Russell Sutherland, even said that UoT would be moving to a Cisco or Juniper router config as he said that he would need fewer Cisco units than Quagga servers to achieve the same amount of routing. The cost savings in power alone is not insignificant. It is a neat experiment and I hope that one day Quagga will surpass enterprise Cisco. Here is a PDF detailing what Russell Sutherland has done: Back to the Future: BSD on the Edge of the Enterprise.
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.
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.