Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 13:51:14 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Matt Dillon" <dillon@earth.backplane.com> Cc: <Bsdguru@aol.com>, <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: RE: Imagestream WanIC-520 interface cards Message-ID: <001f01c15428$cc748d60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <200110130540.f9D5eQW38618@earth.backplane.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Matt Dillon [mailto:dillon@earth.backplane.com] >Sent: Friday, October 12, 2001 10:40 PM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: Bsdguru@aol.com; hackers@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: RE: Imagestream WanIC-520 interface cards > > > The Cisco 2600 series is great for T1's. A 2620 with a T1 card (it > can take up to two) and you are done. The 2501's are ancient, don't > even bother any more. You can find 2620's on EBay in the $700-$1500 > range, many of which appear (in my quick look) to include a T1 card. > > As much as I like to support running things on BSD, I stopped trying to > run T1's from general purpose unix boxes 4 years ago. When BEST Internet > first started we ran the (old) Riscom cards from a BSDI box w/ >an external > csu/dsu, and they were great for that, but these days the overall > cost of ownership is much, much lower with a used cisco and a WAN > card with an integrated csu/dsu in it. It's file and forget... once > you set the thing up you don't have to touch it ever again. > > One advantage of the dot-com crash is that EBay and other sites are > saturated with high quality, barely used hardware. > This is very true for leaf-node routers as used at customer sites and I've said the same thing myself on freebsd-questions before. However, there's still a market for those "Internet access toasters" that are basically PC's plus T1 interfaces, for the "set and forget" crowd. The cost issue, however, not true for BGP routers. Despite the dot-bombs the 7204/6 and the 3640 (both minimum cost of entry for BGP4 on Cisco) are both still very expensive even on Ebay. It's still cheaper to hook a fast Celery or something like that to an ISP feed. Furthermore, I feel compelled to point out that the Internet is still getting bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point in time even with Cisco's packing algorithims, the BGP route table plus Cisco IOS will exceed 128MB of ram. (both the 7206 and 3640 are limited to this as a maximum) Long before that the CPU's used in those Cisco devices will be swamped. And, I hear your answer to that, but screw that, why should I have to settle for a half-assed BGP feed with 3/4's of the routes chopped out of it from my providers? I've run BGP4 into both 7206's with NPE200's and Pentium 500Mhz systems with WANic cards, and the PC will converge BGP views faster than the Cisco, and tolerate route flaps far better, while under routing load. Cisco has a lot of exposure here, and their answer to the need for increased routing power on the Internet has been routers costing in the $100,000 range. Now, maybe BEST Internet is now wealthy enough that you can blow that kind of money on Cisco gear without thinking about it, but a lot of smaller ISP's are not. If you look at what happened last weekend on Sunday, and the number of people that screamed about it, it's quite obvious that there are a huge number of gated and zebra boxes out there handling global routing. Take off those Cisco blinders, boy! ;-) Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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