This is what we do too: Separate firewalling and routing. We use Vyatta for both and it works. Bye, David -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: Matt Palmer [mailto:mpalmer@hezmatt.org] Verzonden: zondag 19 mei 2013 23:32 Aan: nanog@nanog.org Onderwerp: Re: High throughput bgp links using gentoo + stipped kernel On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 11:48:17AM -0400, Nick Khamis wrote:
We do use a statefull iptables on our router, some forward rules... This is known to be on of our issues, not sure if having a separate iptables box would be the best and only solution for this?
I don't know about "only", but it'd have to come close to "best". iptables (and stateful firewalling in general) is a pretty significant CPU and memory sink. Definitely get rid of any stateful rules, preferably *all* the rules, and apply them at a separate location. We've always had BGP routing separated from firewalling, but we're currently migrating from one-giant-core-firewall to lots-of-little-firewalls because our firewalls are starting to cry a little. Nice thing is that horizontally scaling firewalls is easy -- just whack 'em on each subnet instead of running everything together. Core routing is a little harder to scale out (although as has been described already, by no means impossible). The important thing is to remove *anything* from your core routing boxes that doesn't *absolutely* have to be there -- and stateful firewall rules are *extremely* high on that list. - Matt -- When the revolution comes, they won't be able to FIND the wall. -- Brian Kantor, in the Monastery