Chris Wilson writes:
In any case, I'd be pretty fearful of running OC-level bandwidth over a PC... "Gee, the corporate network went down because the router's hard drive crashed!"
I'd be far more fearful of being able to say "the corporate network went down because *THE* router died." If your network is mission critical, having a "THE" router isn't the right thing -- you need redundancy. (I must say that I'm frequently upset when large network providers tell me on the phone "sorry you are having trouble, THE router in Oshkosh went down...) As for the other implication, although I personally don't run or intend to run networks using normal unix boxes as routers (and BTW, PCI bus covers Power-PC hardware, Alphas and soon Suns, too!), I know of organizations like Demon in the U.K. that run almost exclusively this way and seem to like it a lot. I actually was envisioning applications other than backbone routing for PCI Packet-Over-OC-[N] cards, but thats another story... Perry