Network oriented services with FreeBSD

[Ken Menzel]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Vince" <jhary at unsane.co.uk>
To: "'Suporte Matik'" <asstec at matik.com.br>; <freebsd-isp at freebsd.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2005 4:43 PM
Subject: RE: Network oriented services with FreeBSD


>
>
>> -----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
>
http://www.freesbie.org/

Even better than mirroring get rid of the hard drive completely with a 
bootable CD-image currently based on FreeBSD 5.3.
FreeSBIE is a LiveCD based on the FreeBSD Operating system, or even 
easier, a FreeBSD-based operating system that works directly from a 
CD, without touching your hard drive.

Ken