Network oriented services with FreeBSD

[Lewis Watson]

> what kind of network oriented services you guys
> successfully (performance, scalability,...) run on
> can it
> be used for l2tp termination, per user bandwidth
> control, network load-balancing or that kind of very
> network oriented stuff, in an ISP environment and how
> does it scale compared with other solutions. 
> Thanks,
> Laurent

Hi Laurent,
We have used FreeBSD in different situations within our network, as well as some of our client networks,  always with a positive result. 
Examples:
Router with basic packet filtering
Router with stateful packet filtering and bandwidth management.  

We have assisted clients in deploying it as a bridge so that they could review where their bandwidth was being used and then configured it to manage bandwidth.  We have had other cases  where we used FreeBSD as a NAT/ DHCP server. The largest of these I personally have known of was for a network with ~ 3000 active hosts.  It seems I have seen information on load balancing but I cannot remember where. Below is a quick list of a few applications to consider; I am sure there are many more that are not included...

Dynamic routing:
Routed
Zebra
OpenBGPD

Packet Filtering/ Firewalling:
IPFW
PF
IPF

Bandwidth Management/ QOS:
Dummynet
ALT-Q

On the hardware side we have used anything from a Pentium 133 w/ 64MB RAM up to a 1GHz PIII with 512MB RAM. 

Have Fun!
Lewis Watson