Date: Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:25:49 -0400 (EDT) From: Bradley Dunn <bradley@dunn.org> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Multi-homed - Load Balancing - No Single Point of Failure Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970814224858.20679A-100000@ns2.harborcom.net> In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19970814141553.01064910@ccsales.com>
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WARNING!!! CONTENT FOLLOWS!!! THOSE EXPECTING FLAMES NOT CONTENT HIT 'D' NOW!!! On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Randy A. Katz wrote: > What are you guys using for T1 cards and/or routers to do Multi-homing & > load balancing and no single point of failure? The discussion thus far has seemed to focus on ET, SDL, BSDI, FreeBSD, etc...The real issue, *for this particular situation* is cisco IOS vs. GateD. If you go with a PC-based solution, no matter what vendor you get the OS and serial card from, you will need GateD to handle the BGP for you. Gated is now pay-to-play if you want any of the newer features. See www.gated.org for details. Basically it is going to cost you at least $12,000 for the first year, and then $10,000 PER YEAR after that. That is not trivial for the small to mid-size ISP. That reduces significantly the cost savings of chosing a PC over a cisco. There is still a public version of GateD you can use for free, but it lacks some of the features that are standard in cisco IOS. (BGP communities, confederations, route reflectors, OSPF MD5 auth...) I also much prefer IOS's implementation of iBGP to GateD's. People are using it to do BGP, though, and it does generally work. Make sure your upstreams DO NOT send you the community attribute, as the public version of GateD does not handle it well. You will also find a lot more people able to help you with cisco configuration as opposed to GateD, especially if your upstream providers are asking you to use cisco. Another feature of the cisco is that it makes it harder for you to shoot yourself in the foot. You can botch an IOS upgrade and the cisco will still be able to use the boot ROM to bring its interfaces up and you will be able to telnet to it. From there you can use tftp to get a fixed image loaded into flash. Try doing that with a PC when you botch a software upgrade. (Yes I know about nextboot(8), it's not the same.) It can be done with either, though. People are using all kinds of different setups and you will find people happy with all different kinds of setups and you will also find those who are unhappy. Our current setup involves both. We use ciscos to talk to our upstreams, while we use PC routers for internal routing. Using ciscos for our 'net connections means we can use the features of cisco's BGP implementation and such. Using PC's for internal routing means we can take advantage of things such as ipfilter to protect our servers and ET's BWMGR to throttle collocated customers down to their paid-for bandwidth. I would recommend finding a couple spare PCs to test GateD on and you can see for yourself how you like it. I would definitely advise getting familar with GateD before banking your 'net connectivity on it. pbd -- Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car.
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