Network oriented services with FreeBSD

[Suporte Matik]

On Saturday 26 March 2005 11:53, Bob Martin wrote:
> We do all of our routing and firewalls with FreeBSD, instead of
> dedicated equipment like Cisco. In short, a Xeon based PC (we're
> using mostly ~2ghz, single processor boxen) that can be bought for
> less than a $1000 will do almost anything a $15,000 dollar name
> brand router will do. And it will do a few things the named brand
> units wont, like traffic analysis. Instead of having the dedicated
> equipment and a server, we just have a server.
>

Hi
probably not a fair comparism since your $15K router will have some 
pretty clever interfaces which you possible do not get or at least 
have to buy to put them into your PC and configure them if you can.
Lots of things IOS can do FreeBSd can still not, as CEF, class maps, 
loadbalance, backuproute, VoIP to call only some
IMO BGP with Zebra on FBSD also is not close and reliable enough to 
CISCO BGP .
So what you say may be ok for a simple router with some functions but 
a cisco 2xxx does not cost 15k but all depends on size of the 
network. May be an ISP with a small link does it well without 
dedicated router but if you talk about network services I don't 
know ...
And don't forget the disks, I will not even think about if a HD 
crashes on a network router. I have some Ciscos running a couple of 
years now without touching them.
Hans

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