We service most of the state's public schools and libraries (about 1000). Historically the CPE of choice was a small Cisco ISR (1600, 1700, 1800, and 1900 most recently). As bandwidth levels went up, and Ethernet-based transport services became available, we started looking and leveraging FOSS on commodity hardware to lower costs and move services to the edge. Right now we have about 100 of the bigger school districts being services by a Linux-based appliance running XORP for its routing engine (we would have tried Quagga, but they don't support multicast routing yet, nor does Vyatta). It's been a learning experience. Most of the problems we ran into have been resolved by tuning the kernel parameters to act more like a router than a desktop or server. XORP itself has had a rocky ride since we started, so the stability of the project has also been a concern. Thankfully it is seeing somewhat active development again. I will note that XORP is very touchy about how it's configured; if you have well tested configuration templates it's fine, but it's very easy to get it into a crashing state based on something as little the order of configuration directives. For the most part once it's running it's stable. Modest hardware (3.2GHz dual-core Xeon, 2GB RAM, with 1GB tied up as a RAM disk) seems to do the job well for 100 Mbps without much issue, and that's with stateful firewall, and web content filtering in place. Instead of doing it in-house we found a vendor in MA that was doing something similar to what we wanted and had them develop a modified version of their existing offering for us. The vendor is MECnet for those interested. On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 6:37 AM, Pierce Lynch <p.lynch@netappliant.com> wrote:
Andreas Echavez [mailto:andreas@livejournalinc.com] originally wrote:
Ultimately, the network is as reliable as you build it. With software, it's much cheaper to divide and scale horizontally. Hardware devices are expensive and usually horizontal scalability never happens. So in reality, an enterprise blows 100k on two routers, they both flop because of some "firmware bug", and you're down.
With this in mind, I am keen to understand how many implementations of packages such as Quagga and Zebra that the group use. With the likes of Vyatta being discussed, I am keen to see if products such as Quagga as still regularly used as it used to be.
Thoughts welcome!
Kind regards,
/P.
-- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/