Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 01:00:47 -0600 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: "Odhiambo Washington" <wash@wananchi.com>, "FBSD-Q" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, kweheria@iconnect.co.ke Subject: Re: Isn't it true? Message-ID: <200108080700.f7870l440614@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <001201c11fca$ff0ecf20$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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On Tue, 7 Aug 2001 22:28:46 -0700 "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote:
+------------------
| Hi Odhiambo,
|
| Sorry about the top post here, but I wanted to give you the detailed
| explanation before you start spending money on things, and before
| the rest of the eager beavers here had got you totally confused. :-)
+------------------
Ted,
It appears that you have confused the OP's product selection with
some other device. I looked over the description of the Mainstreet
2701 at
http://www.cid.alcatel.com/doctypes/product/html/
The 2701 appears to be an async NTU for use in a private TDM network.
From what I've read it looks like the OP is right on track to a
robust solution assuming that the circit between the two 2701 is
two unloaded copper pair A standard PC style 16550A UART should
work perfectly. there is no need for a fancy synchronous interface
card. Infact one will not work with the V.24 interface on the 2701.
For this application the 2701 is a bit of overkill, If it is surplus
hardware that's great. But if he is buying hardware to do this
and has line of sight I might recomend a pair of ORiNOCO 802.11b
cards and a pair of dish antennae.
chris
+------------------
|
| You see, here in the US we don't use icky things like 64k sync circuits
| anymore and most WAN techs are very unfamiliar with the oddball hardware
| used to connect that stuff. Instead, high speed WANS here are based around
a
| thing called a T1 or 1/24th of a t1 called a 56k circuit. We use things
| called DSU's that plug them in, which are different than the DTU's like
| the Mainstreet 2701.
|
| By the way, thanks for the plug. :-)
|
| For starters, for just a single point-to-point link you don't need
| Zebra. At most if one side has a gateway to the Internet you might have a
| couple of static routes in the routers. Zebra, gated, and routed are intend
ed
| to be used for WANS that have redundant links because as links come up and g
o
| down the routes change, and the routing daemons manage those route table
| changes. Your WAN bandwidth is precious and expensive and you don't want to
| waste it by shipping routing updates across it for routes that will never
| change.
|
| Secondly, yes you can use a FreeBSD box in place of a Cisco router. I do
it
| at the ISP that I admin and I run BGP4 with a full BGP feed on it. I have 2
| T1's and 2 100BaseT Ethernet connections into the box, and 3 of the
| connections are Internet feeds. It works fairly well. The route table on
| that system is close to 100k routes. I use gated.
|
| Now, in your case I looked up the specs for the Mainstreet 2701. First
| of all the serial cable that comes out of it is a V.24 interface, it is
| NOT an X.21 interface!! Your not going to be happy with the results
| attempting to plug it into an X.21 interface card. ;-)
|
| Secondly, it appears to be a _synchronous_ RS232C interface. While it
| is electrically compatible with a PC serial port, a garden variety PC
| serial port is asynchronous, NOT synchronous, so that won't work either.
|
| As far as I know, there's only 2 vendors that currently are selling
| sync serial cards with V.24 that will run under FreeBSD, the first is Sangom
a,
| and the second (the vendor that I use) is a WANic 400 or 405, from SBS
| Technologies.
|
| In my case I actually use the RISCom cards, they are the predicessor cards
| to the WANic 400/405. It's the same chipset, and made by the same vendor, t
he
| only difference is that one card is ISA the other is PCI.
|
| In fact, the sync controller chipset in both of those cards is the
| HD64570 chip, which is EXACTLY the same chip as Cisco uses in the 25xx
| series of routers. (2501, 2511, 2522, etc.)
|
| Now for the bad news: a new WANic is going to cost about $800 USD unless
| you can possibly find one used. (and goodness knows I've tried - the 2
| RISCom cards I got were used and they were eye-raising expensive as it was)
| This is more money than if you get up on Ebay and buy yourself a used Cisco
| 2522 or 2501 or something like that, plus cabling. (In fact, I've got a use
d
| 2501 with a RS232 sync cable that I'd sell but if you want to pursue that ta
ke
| it offline with me. I'm sure that you can find used vendors that are in you
r
| country without the messiness of the import/export stuff)
|
| So, in summary if you want to use FreeBSD to save money, you won't because
| the cost of a sync V.24 is going to be the killer. If, however, you want to
| do it just for fun, then that's fine - but remember that you have got 2
| offices there and if your toy goes offline in the middle of the day your goi
ng
| to have a lot of pissed-off people. :-)
|
| In our case the cost of a Cisco 7206 (the minimum Cisco capabable of
| running BGP without up and dying) is about $30,000 USD so that was plenty of
| financial incentive to go the BSD route. (no pun intended)
|
| Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com
| Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
| Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com
|
|
| >-----Original Message-----
| >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
| >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Odhiambo
| >Washington
| >Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 8:11 AM
| >To: FBSD-Q
| >Cc: kweheria@iconnect.co.ke
| >Subject: Isn't it true?
| >
| >
| >Such a dumb subject line but isn't it true that nobody in the
| >knowledge-rich FreeBSD world has ever gone out of their 'mind' (I mean
| >their way) and done something like substituting a FreeBSD box for a Cisco
| >router like this:
| > Telco Link _____
| > LAN<-->[____]----->[...]================[...]----->|_____|<----->LAN
| > FreeBSD Mainstreet Mainstreet Cisco
| > Box 2701 2701 2522
| >
| >
| >If someone _ever_ tried it, I request to share in their feat ;-)
| >
| >
| >Thanks
| >
| >
| >-Wash
| >
| >--
| >Odhiambo Washington
| >Wananchi Online Ltd.,
| >wash@wananchi.com 1st Flr Loita Hse.
| >Tel: 254 2 313985 Loita Street.,
| >Fax: 254 2 313922 PO Box 10286,00100-NAIROBI,KE.
| >
| >To sentence a man of true genius, to the drudgery of a school is to put a
| >racehorse on a treadmill.
| >-Charles Caleb Colton
| >
| >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
| >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
| >
|
|
| To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
| with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
+------------------
--
Chris Fedde
303 773 9134
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