I don't think you will have any troubles with industry standard hardware for the rates you are quoting. When you get in excess of 300Mbps you have to start worrying about PPS. When you are looking at >600Mbps then you should pick out your system more carefully (tcpoe nics, pcie(X), cpu at over Xghz, fast ram if you are doing a lot of BGP, tweaking your linux distribution and kernel, etc.). You should be fine with any recent hardware. A cheap HP dl360 would do a great job. --p -----Original Message----- From: Chris [mailto:chris@ghostbusters.co.uk] Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 9:03 AM To: nanog list Subject: Gigabit Linux Routers Hi All, Sorry if this is a repeat topic. I've done a fair bit of trawling but can't find anything concrete to base decisions on. I'm hoping someone can offer some advice on suitable hardware and kernel tweaks for using Linux as a router running bgpd via Quagga. We do this at the moment and our box manages under the 100Mbps level very effectively. Over the next year however we expect to push about 250Mbps outbound traffic with very little inbound (50Mbps simultaneously) and I'm seeing differing suggestions of what to do in order to move up to the 1Gbps level. It seems even a dual core box with expensive NICs and some kernel tweaks will accomplish this but we can't afford to get the hardware purchases wrong. We'd be looking to buy one live and one standby box within the next month or so. They will only run Quagga primarily with 'tc' for shaping. We're in the UK if it makes any difference. Any help massively appreciated, ideally from those doing the same in production environments. Thanks, Chris