vyatta for bgp

Mon Sep 26 19:20:00 UTC 2011

--- rps at maine.edu wrote:
From: Ray Soucy <rps at maine.edu>

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.
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After roll-out and after a time in steady-state operation did you do an analysis of human and hardware/software costs (as well as service to end sites, such as outages that might not have happened with normal routers and LAN switches) to see if you actually saved money?

scott