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Date:      Wed, 29 Mar 2000 14:24:58 -0500
From:      Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.ca>
To:        Dennis <dennis@etinc.com>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Building 8-port Router
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.20000329142458.0205c5a0@marble.sentex.ca>
In-Reply-To: <200003291906.OAA26812@etinc.com>
References:  <38b4b9a7.22295369@mail.sentex.net> <MAIL20000224085638.A706@tirad.internal.iphil.net> <MAIL20000224085638.A706@tirad.internal.iphil.net>

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At 02:03 PM 3/29/00 -0500, Dennis wrote:
>At 05:19 AM 2/24/00 +0000, Mike Tancsa wrote:
>>Although Zebra is probably the way of the future, you may want to look at
>>gateD for now.  Its bgp and ospf has been quite reliable for us. Its
>>features are sparse, but it might have all that you need. With two full
>>views, you want more than 128M of RAM if you really are going to install
>>70K+ routes in the kernel routing table.  196 is fine, but with the cost of
>>RAM these days, you might as well throw in 256MB.  With a decent Celeron
>>(433 is fine), you can get some pretty OK convergence times.   On one of my
>>borders, I push about ~15Mb/s though 4 ethernet interfaces with a dozen
>>ipfw filter rules. 
>
>Zebra works just fine as long as your network isnt too complex. GateD has
>other issues, and at least with Zebra you can get things fixed quickly.
>Gated has become a polical black hole.

Mired in politics or not, gated to date has done the job for us. i.e. if
you need OSPF and eBGP, and you want it to just plain work, it does the
job.  Apart from trying it internally for ospf we havent deployed Zebra
yet.  Although by the sounds of it, it might be ready for us to try.
Whether it will fit everyone's needs I dont know.  But dont discount gated
because of actual or perceived politics around Merit. I also follow the
gated public list, and the people there are pleasant and helpful, as it is
on the zebra list.

>You dont need that much memory in your box...you just need to adjust the
>kernel in FreeBSD to use more. A full view is only about 20K, so you can
>get several views in 128M . the default is for the kernel to use only 1/3
>of the memory, which is bad for a router. Our routers hack it to use 2/3,
>which leaves 80M for the kernel and routing tables.

Our gated proces can eat upto 40+M.  With the price of RAM, the size of the
global routing table, and for protection against your peers accidentally
de-aggregating routes etc, the price for the extra RAM on a fairly
important box can be easily justified.  That being said, it is a good idea
to adjust the amount of RAM allocated to the kernel, as well as perhaps
adjusting things like kernel granularity.  There are many good threads in
the archives around this.

	---Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike Tancsa,                          	          tel +1 519 651 3400
Network Administrator,     			  mike@sentex.net
Sentex Communications                 		  www.sentex.net
Cambridge, Ontario Canada


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