The Making of a Router

Sat Dec 28 14:31:11 UTC 2013

In article <xs4all.CALFTrnNyr4V_Op0Rg4MGfN+8zX6474p80UpX3TM35y8kyYZLqA at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>It seems to be a pretty "hot button" issue, but I feel that modern hardware
>is more than capable of pushing packets.  The old wisdom of "only hardware
>can do it efficiently" is starting to prove untrue.  10G might still be a
>challenge (I haven't tested), but 1G is not even close to being an issue.
> Depending on the target for your deployment, it might make sense to
>whitebox a router or firewall instead of spending 20K on it.  Especially if
>you're working with any kind of scale.

Yes well, but also remember that bandwidth is not everything. Packets
per second is. And if you're going to provide internet connectivity
to endusers, some of them /will/ get hit with DDOS attacks. With
a hardware router you can survive that as long as the DDOS is not
consuming all your bandwidth. A software router being bombarded
with a few gigabits of 64 byte packets .. not so much.

This is also the reason btw that you should look into shaping the
outgoing bandwidth to each enduser, to prevent one of them being
DDOSsed filling up the entire link he/she is on.

Mike.