On Thu, 27 Apr 1995, Curtis Villamizar wrote:
Would anyone be willing to share their experiences with (or thoughts about) this approach? Given that 64 MB of RAM for routing tables woudl cost only around $2,000, this seems like a totally sensible way to build a small, multi-homed AS. Will finding a vendor-supported system for this be ... difficult? (I'm not exactly sure whether a BSD box running Cornell GateD counts as "vendor-supported". ;-)
BSDI works and comes with gated, though not the latest. The Riscom-N2 is supported by BSDI and can give you 2 56k or even T1 lines speaking Cisco HDLC or PPP. I can't say I've ever tried it, but some people say it would all work fine. You could also take a subset of full routing since you probably won't be doing transit between major providers.
Emerging Technologies also makes sync cards with drivers supported under BSDI, FreeBSD and some forms of SysV UNIX. They have been discussed on either (or both) the inet-access and bsdi-users lists in the past. Archives for inet-access are at earth.com (or is that ftp.earth.com) and for bsdi-users at ftp.bsdi.com. There is sometimes a search engine available for bsdi-users from a link at http://www.bsdi.com. I got my info by emailing dennis@et.htp.com but you could phone (516) 271-4525 or fax (516) 271-4814 So there are at least two possibilities for building 80x86 boxes into routers by using off-the-shelf sync cards and UNICES.
with NetBSD on an older Sun. For PCs there is BSDI, FreeBSD, Linux.
I believe that support for sync cards under Linux is fairly new. Tread carefully there.
If you can afford to be dual homed, you probably can afford a router rather than a PC serving as a router.
There is also the question of support, spares, previous knowledgebase etc. Build-your-own isn't for everyone but it is nice to have a choice. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-549-1036 Network Operations Fax: +1-604-542-4130 Okanagan Internet Junction Internet: michael@junction.net http://www.junction.net - The Okanagan's 1st full-service Internet provider