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Powerful Linux ISP Router Distribution?
fibrewire writes "I'm building a Wireless ISP using commercial grade, low cost equipment. My main stumbling block is that I cannot find a decent open source ISP class routing distribution. Closest thing to even a decent tool is Ubiquiti's AIRControl — but even it doesn't play well with other network monitoring software. I've used Mikrotik's RouterOS for five years, but it just isn't built for what I need. I don't mind paying licensing fees, but $300K for a Cisco Universal Broadband Router is out of my budget. Has anyone seen any good open-source/cheap hardware/software systems that will scale to several thousand users?"
Does it have to be Linux?
Why not try OpenBSD and its excellent BGP implementation OpenBGP! It powers some pretty hefty businesses and ISPs.
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Trolling is a art,
You can have low-cost commercial grade services run using off-the-shelf hardware.
pfSense includes support for CARP, which lets you build high-availablity failover clusters. You can have two (or three or four...) cheap systems and if one dies, just fix/replace it as needed. The backup system(s) automatically take over and nobody would likely even notice the changeover.
When it's cheap, that is much easier to consider.
If you want no moving parts, you can use an ALIX box, Soekris, or perhaps even some atom-based boards. If you want to use server-grade boxes to make yourself feel warm and fuzzy, you can do that too. Supermicro even has a server-class atom board in a 1U rack which runs pfSense very well for us.