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PC Routers (was Re: /24s run amuck)

  • From: Stephen J. Wilcox
  • Date: Wed Jan 14 17:05:14 2004

On Wed, 14 Jan 2004, [email protected] wrote:

> > http://www.imagestream.com/Cisco_Comparison.html
> > 
> > How many of you would buy an Imagestream box to evaluate for
> > your next network buildout? 
> 
> For a relatively simple end-user BGP customer, it works fine.  And the
> nice thing is it's PC-type hardware so if you need more RAM, just throw in
> another dimm.  No worries about the global routing table growing and
> having to buy a bigger router because your year or two old one no longer
> supports enough memory to hold full routes.  I suspect the CPUs are
> upgradable as well...but I've never actually touched the hardware...I've
> always worked on it remotely.

Have been discussing PCs for a bit but as yet not deployed one, as I understand 
it a *nix based PC running Zebra will work pretty fine but has the constraints 
that:

o) It has no features - not a problem for a lot of purposes

This isnt necessarily a problem for what I have in mind

o) On a standard PCI but your limit is about 350Mb, you can increase that to a 
couple of Gb using 64-bit fancy thingies

For connecting to small IXPs, connecting customers, I dont need large amounts of
throughput.

o) This may be fixed but I found it slow to update the kernel routing table
which isnt designed to take 120000 routes being added at once

Icky, could perhaps cause issues if theres a major reconvergence due to an 
adjacent backbone router failing etc, might be okay tho

o) As its entirely process based it will hurt badly in a DoS attack

This is a show stopper. I need the box to stay up in an attack and be responsive 
to me whilst I attempt to find the source.

I'm not an expert in PC hardware, so I do struggle to work out the architecture 
that I need and I'm sure its possible to build boxes that are optimised for this 
purpose however I'm still not convinced that the box can keep up with the 
demands of day to day packet switching - I'd like to hear otherwise tho.. has 
anyone deployed a PC with Zebra that could switch a few Gbs, didnt suffer from 
latency or jitter or fail under a DoS?

Steve