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

  • From: Vinny Abello
  • Date: Thu May 23 09:28:11 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.

--
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 Jon Lewis *[email protected]*|  I route
 System Administrator        |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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Vinny Abello
Network Engineer
Server Management
[email protected]
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