On Thu, 27 Apr 1995 22:49:34 -0400 Curtis Villamizar wrote:

If you can afford to be dual homed, you probably can afford a router rather than a PC serving as a router. I'd love to hear how things go if you go with BSDI. There is also an Emerging Technologies T1/56k card that claims ISDN LAPB, FR, X.25, Cisco HDLC, PPP and which sounds great on paper but I haven't heard any user testimonials yet.

The RIPE NCC (AS3333) is using a BSDI box as BGP router, so that definitely works. Make shure you get decent hardware; PC manufacturers sometimes cut corners and, for instance, I had to disable the external cache on amsterdam.ripe.net to make the box stable. We're not using serial cards as we were able to attach to the Amsterdam DMZ directly. (and you can play doom on a PC; try that on a cisco ;-) I have been thinking about Sean's idea of using gated as BGP talker, and haveing only gated talk to the box switching packets. The routes sent to the router can then be aggressively aggregated only based on nexthop, because the router doesn't need more detailed routing information. I haven't further investigated the idea, but I think it might be possible to e.g. run CSC-3's with 'full' routing this way (if in Europe, you prefer one carrier for US routes, then 198/7 might be possible...) Unfortunately, I don't have the time to (test-)implement it. Note that this might scale better than using router-CPU's; it is much more likely that the generic computer industry can scale up CPU's faster than dedicated router manufacturers can. A disadvantage of this approach is that you are running something different than the majority of BGP talkers, and there might be incompatibilities. This quite clearly showed during the Danvers IETF when someone inject ASpaths with 109 109 109 on the end; this caused older gated's to shut down the peering and caused quite some problems for those sites using gated. We have upgraded our box since then; Curtis, have you had a chance to look at this yet? It is a disaster waiting to happen again, and next time the players might not be convienently located in the same IETF terminal room... Geert Jan

PSC runs DEC Alphas with gated. This is a supported but expensive option. Handy if you have a Cray and don't want a wimpy router in your FDDI path.

Expensive in terms of people, perhaps, in that it doesn't run out of the box. But once the config is made, it is fairly easy to maintain and has some nice properties that you can't easily find on vendor routers. They also tend to have bigger queues than vendor routers. On the downside, the newest generation of routers blows the doors off of the workstations, especially in terms of packets per second. (For example, the last years Alphas push something in the 3000-5000 pps range, where the vendor routers go 20-100 kpps. Don't know what this year's model does. Note that 3000 pps is full FDDI if people use reasonable -- 4kB -- packet sizes, though). The real rebuttal I wanted to make, though, is that the Alpha workstation costs in the $10K price range, with about $1200 per interface for FDDI (less if you can do the UTP business which alas we cannot). Compare this with todays prices on vendor routers and then tell me if you think it is expensive...

Avoid sys5 based stuff like Solaris and SGI Irix since it can't do CIDR routes and barfs badly on overlapped routes. Probably HP too. That leave DEC OSF and AIX. You could probably go with NetBSD on an older Sun. For PCs there is BSDI, FreeBSD, Linx.

I should add that we haven't extensively tested the CIDR stuff on our Alphas since we don't currently take full routing tables. But if Curtis says it should work I believe him :-) --Jamshid

Uh.. thruth in advertising time. There were some radix tree bugs in BSD that Dennis found when playing with NetBSD on Sparc and BSDI. I'm not sure if they made it into BSD 4.4Lite, BSDI 2.0, or any DEC OSF product. I think Jeff sent the patches to someone at UCB and to BSDI. I think they made BSDI 2.0 but I'd guess not the others yet.

Better get a more reliable source. :-)

Yikes. That may be me. All of the bad stuff Dennis and Jeff found in BNR2 (which formed the basis for BSD/OS 1.x) was sent to CSRG and most of it appeared in 4.4BSD-Lite (which formed the basis for BSD/OS 2.0). Some additional things have been fixed since then, according to Keith Sklower and others, and we should see some additional improvements in 4.4BSD-Lite-2, due out any day. Elise, perhaps Merit should invite Jeff Honig <jch@gated.cornell.edu> of the GateD Consortium to attend the next meeting and give us an update? I could sort of do it but I'd be hacking around in the dark -- Jeff actually knows what's going on. It's pretty clear that GateD is an important tool for North American (and other) Network Operators.