vyatta for bgp

Mon Sep 26 17:49:21 UTC 2011

We service most of the state's public schools and libraries (about
1000).  Historically the CPE of choice was a small Cisco ISR (1600,
1700, 1800, and 1900 most recently).  As bandwidth levels went up, and
Ethernet-based transport services became available, we started looking
and leveraging FOSS on commodity hardware to lower costs and move
services to the edge.  Right now we have about 100 of the bigger
school districts being services by a Linux-based appliance running
XORP for its routing engine (we would have tried Quagga, but they
don't support multicast routing yet, nor does Vyatta).

It's been a learning experience.  Most of the problems we ran into
have been resolved by tuning the kernel parameters to act more like a
router than a desktop or server.  XORP itself has had a rocky ride
since we started, so the stability of the project has also been a
concern.  Thankfully it is seeing somewhat active development again.
I will note that XORP is very touchy about how it's configured; if you
have well tested configuration templates it's fine, but it's very easy
to get it into a crashing state based on something as little the order
of configuration directives.  For the most part once it's running it's
stable.

Modest hardware (3.2GHz dual-core Xeon, 2GB RAM, with 1GB tied up as a
RAM disk) seems to do the job well for 100 Mbps without much issue,
and that's with stateful firewall, and web content filtering in place.

Instead of doing it in-house we found a vendor in MA that was doing
something similar to what we wanted and had them develop a modified
version of their existing offering for us.  The vendor is MECnet for
those interested.

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 6:37 AM, Pierce Lynch <p.lynch at netappliant.com> wrote:
> Andreas Echavez [mailto:andreas at livejournalinc.com] originally wrote:
>> Ultimately, the network is as reliable as you build it. With software, it's much cheaper to divide and scale horizontally. Hardware devices are expensive and usually horizontal
>> scalability never happens. So in reality, an enterprise blows 100k on two routers, they both flop because of some "firmware bug", and you're down.
>
> With this in mind, I am keen to understand how many implementations of packages such as Quagga and Zebra that the group use. With the likes of Vyatta being discussed, I am keen to see if products such as Quagga as still regularly used as it used to be.
>
> Thoughts welcome!
>
> Kind regards,
>
> /P.
>
>

-- 
Ray Soucy

Epic Communications Specialist

Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526

Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System
http://www.networkmaine.net/