Routers vs. PC's for routing - was list problems?

Thu May 23 13:26:41 UTC 2002

I would have to say for any Linux/BSD platform to be a viable routing 
solution, you have to eliminate all moving parts or as much as possible, 
ie. no hard drives because hard drives will fail. Not much you can do about 
the cooling fans in various parts of the machine though which routers also 
tend to have. Solid state storage would be the way to go as far as what the 
OS is installed on. You have to have something to imitate flash on the 
common router. Otherwise, if you can get the functionality out of a PC, I 
say go for it! The processing power of a modern PC is far beyond any router 
I can think of. I suppose it would just be a matter of how efficient your 
kernel, TCP/IP stack and routing daemon would be at that point. :)

At 10:48 PM 5/22/2002, you wrote:

>On Wed, 22 May 2002, Andy Dills wrote:
>
> > > >From the number of personal replies I got about these topics, it seems
> > > like many people are interested in sharing information about how to do
> > > routing on a budget, or how to avoid getting shot in the foot with your
> > > Cisco box.
> >
> > Routing on a budget? Dude, you can buy a 7200 for $2 grand. Why bother
> > with a linux box? Heh, at least use FreeBSD :)
>
>Before the dot com implosion, they weren't nearly that inexpensive.  The
>average corporate user will also need smartnet (what's that on a 7200, a K
>or a few per year?) for support, warranty, and software updates.  Some
>people just don't appreciate being nickled and dimed by cisco and forced
>to either buy much more router than they need, or risk ending up with
>another cisco boat anchor router when the platform they chose can no
>longer do the job in the limited memory config supported.
>
>I have a consulting customer who, against my strong recommendation, bought
>a non-cisco router to multihome with.  It's PC based, runs Linux, and with
>the exception of the gated BGP issue that bit everyone running gated a few
>months ago, has worked just fine.  It's not as easy to work with in most
>cases, but there are some definite advantages, and some things that Linux
>actually makes easier.  They'd initially bought a 2621 when multihoming
>was just a thought, and by the time it was a reality, 64mb on a 2621
>couldn't handle full routes.  The C&W/PSI depeering (which did affect
>this customer, as they were single homed to C&W at the time and did
>regular business with networks single homed to PSI) was proof that without
>full routes, you're not really multihomed.
>
>--
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
>  System Administrator        |  therefore you are
>  Atlantic Net                |
>_________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

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