Zebra Router???

Joshua Kenan shuki at kenan.us
Sun Apr 20 18:05:38 UTC 2003


>From my personal experience, the "Olive" is just plain old JunOS.
When you install it on a PC, it does not include the hardware related
elements, I found this out when the M10 crashed and I installed from scratch
outside the M10 hardware (on a new disk on a PC). For the record, all you
have to do is reinstall the package and the hardware will show up.

I ran several Ethernet ports and it worked fine. I am not sure about PCI GE
ports and if they are supported. Bottom line, if you have JunOS you can make
a stand alone pc work as a router (did this with 5.2R1.4-domestic). 

This was a great solution for a lab router doing protocols, not sure about
performance. 

All the best,

JK


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
Omachonu Ogali
Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2003 8:05 PM
To: Kevin Day
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Zebra Router???


I had 1 GigE, 2 FastE interfaces, no full feeds, about 16k routes,
pushing 100-120Mbps, and I always hit 100% cpu, causing Zebra's BGP
process to die repeatedly. And, whenever I removed a route from the
Zebra daemon, it didn't get removed from the kernel routing table,
and a simple 'route delete x.x.x.x' did not work, so the route was
effectively STUCK until the next reboot. (No, killing and restarting
the Zebra processes did not work either, nor did a 'route flush').

I've tried different CPUs, motherboards, hard drives, network cards,
kernels, sysctl variables, memory modules, no, some, and all (about 80)
IPFW rules, and still, same results. 100% CPU while the box is sucking
ass at 40-50kpps. Bottom line, from my personal experiences, FreeBSD
sucks as a router, and Zebra sucks as a routing process.

Yeah yeah yeah, Juniper uses FreeBSD for their code, but a) it's heavily
modified, modifications you won't find on the net for yourself, b) they
use ASICs to speed up certain operations, and there is no PCI card with
a PacketGoFaster(tm) chipset you can buy to get better performance out
of your desktop gaming Samba-serving router. I hear Olive has some good
performance, but guess what, it's not public domain and your chances of
finding it are very slim, so you're SOL for now.

But hey, your mileage may vary.




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