Network oriented services with FreeBSD

[Vince]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-isp at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-isp at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Suporte Matik
> Sent: 26 March 2005 17:29
> To: freebsd-isp at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Network oriented services with FreeBSD
> 
> 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


Disks are not too much of an issue as with some tweaking you can either
A) nfs boot your freebsd router from redundant sources
B) use pcmcia or similar solid state filesystem
C) use software/hardware mirroring. 
And the one time a freebsd box I had had a hard disk failure it stayed up 
Untill I replaced it anyway as it had minimal disk usage.

Also with most of the hardware routers its not the hardware that costs 
Its support and upgrades. I've had freebsd Firewalls run for at least
3 years with no reboot so uptime is hardly an issue. I havent ever had 
to have a router run that long As I'm quite new to the ISP rather than 
end user side of things.


Vince

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