North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: Software router state of the art

  • From: David E. Smith
  • Date: Tue Jul 29 11:28:59 2008
Andrew D Kirch wrote:
Anyone have experience with RouterOS (http://www.mikrotik.com/)? Created mostly to run on these guys I think (http://www.routerboard.com/comparison.html) which generally don't get above 200k pps on the higher models.. But will RouterOS run on bigger boxen?
Yes I do, and I'm still in therapy. I was pushing 30mbit, and I can't remember how many PPS through one, and it crashed about once a month requiring onsite intervention (usually at midnight). This was running on a Compaq Deskpro I think. It doesn't have much support for good network cards. I suspect the Realtek's were behind the crashes.
The Realteks were almost certainly to blame. Just like any other "server," good hardware is well worth it. RouterOS 2.9 and 3.x support Intel's gigabit server NICs, which work quite well.

www.mikrotikrouter.com sells a few nice purpose-built rackmount appliances for this sort of thing. (Just a happy customer, don't work there or anything.)

If you have the budget, and need the single-purpose horsepower, you'll usually be happier with Cisco or Juniper or someone that makes dedicated routing kit. If money's tight, or you need one box to do several network-related jobs for whatever reason, Mikrotik's software is another useful tool to have.

David Smith
MVN.net

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature