From another list...
given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily. ... Comments from the gated crowd? The cisco crowd? -- Regards, Bill Manning
From: bmanning@is.rice.edu (William Manning) Subject: innocent remark
From another list...
given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily. ... Comments from the gated crowd? The cisco crowd? Go for it, have a party. I've got 2 BSD boxes myself, and I prefer them over clunky cisco routers. Besides, have you ever been able to play DOOM on an AGS? -- Regards, Bill Manning
Comments from the gated crowd? The cisco crowd?
Go for it, have a party. I've got 2 BSD boxes myself, and I prefer them over clunky cisco routers. Besides, have you ever been able to play DOOM on an AGS?
-- Regards, Bill Manning
OBoff-topic: You can have 'em, Bill. I think I've got better uses for my Unix boxes anyway. _______________________________________________________________________________ Paul Ferguson US Sprint Enterprise Internet Engineering tel: 703.904.2437 Herndon, Virginia USA internet: paul@hawk.sprintmrn.com
given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily.
The end of the last sentence is wrong (the start of the last sentence might be too, though I'm biased enough to maybe believe it). I know for a fact that, while gated's memory usage is not unreasonable, gated code does tend to resolve memory/CPU tradeoffs in favour of spending memory and saving CPU. And the per-route memory consumption in the Net/II kernel forwarding table is way out of line with what a decent router implementation should do. If you want your 486 box to compete with a 16MB cisco you really need to buy it a couple of extra rows of SIMMs. By the time you get enough neighbours and alternate paths in there to overwhelm a 16MB Cisco the 16MB 486 box will be spending most of its time trying to get large chunks of gated into and out of the page space, though a 32MB 486 box should still be pretty chipper. My (somewhat dated) observation is that i486 machines also seem to do a whole lot of work to get quite mediocre packet-per-second forwarding rates. On the other hand, if you buy it a good screen and interface card, the graphics are much better than even a 64MB Cisco. Dennis Ferguson
a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily.
SL-IIJ-1>show ip b s BGP table version is 9430997, main routing table version 9430997 19216 network entries (32713 paths) using 2945880 bytes of memory 917 BGP path attribute entries using 73740 bytes of memory ... SL-IIJ-1>show mem free Head FreeList Total(b) Used(b) Free(b) Largest(b) Processor 310824 2E96D0 13315724 7699588 5616136 5131068 I/O 6000000 2F04B4 1047544 370708 676836 676836 SRAM 1000 2F11E8 65412 34760 30652 30652 SL-IIJ-1> show ver ... cisco 4000 (68030) processor (revision 0xA0) with 16384K/1024K bytes of memory. ... Cheers, -drc
19216 network entries (32713 paths) using 2945880 bytes of memory Head FreeList Total(b) Used(b) Free(b) Processor 310824 2E96D0 13315724 7699588 5616136 I think that it's time for folks on these mailing lists (and on the BGP list) to stop discussing the number of routes. It's really a bogus metric. Memory (at least in our implementation) is consumed for multiple reasons: paths, the AS path table, the routing table, etc. I would suggest that a much better characterization of BGP memory usage is in terms of both number of routes AND number of paths. A router with 20k routes and 20k paths uses a lot less memory than 20k routes and 100k paths. Admittedly this isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than just one dimension. We now return you to your normally scheduled confusion... Tony
there are a number of companies that have made modest enhancements (some of which you have mentioned) to NetBSD and are or will be deploying routers based on the code using PC or other SBC "platforms". I consider these people to be the "cloners" like a gateway or a dell. They make wonderful 1e1T, 1e1B (BRI), and 1e1V (v.32bis) "edge" routers, but like the PC cloners they will set their sights higher and higher. Marty
given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily.
The end of the last sentence is wrong (the start of the last sentence might be too, though I'm biased enough to maybe believe it). I know for a fact that, while gated's memory usage is not unreasonable, gated code does tend to resolve memory/CPU tradeoffs in favour of spending memory and saving CPU. And the per-route memory consumption in the Net/II kernel forwarding table is way out of line with what a decent router implementation should do. If you want your 486 box to compete with a 16MB cisco you really need to buy it a couple of extra rows of SIMMs. By the time you get enough neighbours and alternate paths in there to overwhelm a 16MB Cisco the 16MB 486 box will be spending most of its time trying to get large chunks of gated into and out of the page space, though a 32MB 486 box should still be pretty chipper.
My (somewhat dated) observation is that i486 machines also seem to do a whole lot of work to get quite mediocre packet-per-second forwarding rates. On the other hand, if you buy it a good screen and interface card, the graphics are much better than even a 64MB Cisco.
Dennis Ferguson
From: bmanning@is.rice.edu (William Manning) Date: Wed, 27 Apr 94 17:09:17 CDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
From another list...
given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily. ... Comments from the gated crowd? The cisco crowd? I would have to wonder about the forwarding performance of 16MB i486 BSD machine acting as a router. Also I am not sure what a full internet route table should be, but a well-architected 16MB turnkey router should be able to support a route table of well over 100,000 routes. -- Regards, Bill Manning Joachim Martillo Manager of Internetworking Research Penril Datability Networks Penril Datability Advanced Communications Research Center 190 N. Main St. Natick, MA 01760 VOICE 508-653-5313 FAX 508-653-6415 EMAIL martillo@dss.com martillo@penril.com
participants (8)
-
bmanning＠is.rice.edu -
David R Conrad -
Dennis Ferguson -
martillo＠penril.com -
Martin Lee Schoffstall -
paul＠hawksbill.sprintmrn.com -
pst＠shockwave.com -
Tony Li