Dear Chris,
One final quick question on the NICs if I can. Following Mike's suggestion about specific Intel chipsets (82575 or 82576) it looks like it's much easier to source the chipsets mentioned by David (82571EB). If these NICs are embedded on the motherboard is it going to be of disadvantage in terms of performance ? I take the point of the interrupts being the key, kindly thrown into the mix by Eugeniu.
For a new system you should go with pci-e cards.
A nice man called John mailed me off list and mentioned this off-the-shelf build. On that note does anyone have any experience of Lannerinc's appliances mentioned above by Ingo
I have posted thos off-list, for the list: http://www.lannerinc.com/DM/FW-7550_DM.pdf pros: cheap, cf-disk support, low power (~50W) cons: only 1GB Ram (enough for 1million routes), pci-connected intel 82541GI, 32bit, 33MHZ acpi max-temp is set to low in bios and needs an acpi-aml file to be loaded http://www.axiomtek.de/uploads/na-820.pdf pros: 7x pci-e www.endian.com use them. http://www.endian.com/en/products/hardware/macro-x2/ OS: Freebsd: pros: very stable, quagge runs very well, fastforwarding support, simple traffic shaping, interrupt less polling supported cons: only 1 route for each network, vrrp failover is not easy to implement with quagga and ospf, no multipath routing Linux: pros: more than 1 route for each network possible, interrupt less polling should be supported? fastforwarding ? cons: no multipath routing Cpu's: Single-core-cpus performs better at freebsd than multi-core ones At freebsd-net mailinglist there is a very long thread about freebsd-routers. Kind regards, Ingo Flaschberger