Hi, I am also newbie poster so likewise plz be kind. I tend to agree with the comments made so far, however depending upon the business, budgets are not always available that might match the requirements and hence I can to some degree understand the use of such boxes for small organisations. I would be interested to know how many "software" (for want of a better description) routers are in live production in this kind of environment i.e. the 99.9999% Uptime variety, from speaking to people albeit randomly in data centres it would seem to be more common than one might expect. Also does anyone have any peering policies which would exclude peers with "software" routers specifically, most have a requirement for the ability to support stable BGP peering but I have not seen any specific exclusions for such "devices"? Mark ________________________________________ From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Tiffany Snyder Sent: 06 June 2006 23:29 To: Nick Burke Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Zebra/linux device production networking? IMHO, it's a bad idea. A less intrusive alternative might be a FreeBSD based platform running Xorp/Quagga. Tiffany. On 6/6/06, Nick Burke <mrmud@mrmud.org> wrote: Greetings fellow nanogers, Long time lurker, first time poster (please, be gentle!). After looking at the archives, I didn't see this particular discussion, so here we go. First, a little background.. My CTO made my stomach curdle today when he announced that he wanted to do away with all our cisco [routers] and instead use Linux/zebra boxen. We are a small company, so naturally penny pinching is the primary motivation. That, and the sheer joy of watching me squirm. He has informed me that he has found "many people" who do this for their "core devices". I'm not so certain about this whole situation, so I humbly ask: How many of you have actually use(d) Zebra/Linux as a routing device (core and/or regional, I'd be interested in both) in a production (read: 99.999% required, hsrp, bgp, dot1q, other goodies) environment? And, if you care to spend this much time, what pitfalls/benefits did you find out about after implementation? Has there been any discussion (or musings) of moving towards such a solution? I've seen a lot of articles talking about it, but I've not actually seen many network operators chiming in. Here's the article that started it all (this was featured on /., so likely you've read it already). http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2004/tc20041129_5206_t c024.htm and another: http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/5693 Feel free to respond off list. If anyone else is interested, I will of course summarize to list or to individuals. (ps, particulars are deliberately not included.. I'm not looking for advice, just if anyone has any solid experience with this..)