From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Aug 14 23:46:14 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id XAA12297 for isp-outgoing; Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:46:14 -0700 (PDT) Received: from avon-gw.uk1.vbc.net (jdd@avon-gw.uk1.vbc.net [194.207.2.20]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id XAA12289 for ; Thu, 14 Aug 1997 23:46:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from jdd@localhost) by avon-gw.uk1.vbc.net (8.8.2/8.7.3) id HAA17372; Fri, 15 Aug 1997 07:46:06 +0100 (BST) Date: Fri, 15 Aug 1997 07:46:06 +0100 (BST) From: Jim Dixon X-Sender: jdd@avon-gw.uk1.vbc.net To: "Randy A. Katz" cc: isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Multi-homed - Load Balancing - No Single Point of Failure In-Reply-To: <3.0.3.32.19970814143306.00b6ac80@ccsales.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Randy A. Katz wrote: > How does one do Multi-homed, Load Balancing & No Single Point of Failure > with Pipeline 130's and Cisco 2501's??? Brief answer: you don't. The Cisco 2501 can't handle BGP4 peering with the number of routes you see today. But you can build cheap and very effective routers using BSD, x86 motherboards, and sync serial cards either from Dennis (www.etinc.com) or SDL (www.sdlcomm.com, I think). Put 64 MB on the motherboard and make sure you can expand it to 128 MB. We use SDL cards, because at the time we evaluated them the SDL boards were better made than the ET boards. That may have changed; Dennis's notion of customer relations hasn't ;-) For reliability, use one such BSD router per link to the backbone. Our experience is that the routers themselves are disgustingly reliable if you don't fiddle around with the source code -- they simply don't fail. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015