Once upon a time, Marcel Rieux <m.z.rieux@xxxxxxxxx> said: > I was under the impression that, at most small ISPs, Linux had > replaced Unix and played a central role in making things work. But > today, I spoke to an ISP employee who told me that Linux was only used > for Web servers and that, for routing and firewalling, nobody escaped > companies Cisco and Juniper which provide "solutions" where part of > the software has been integrated into hardware for efficiency > purposes. Servers don't really make good routers. When you are talking about traditional low- to mid-speed telco circuits (T1, T3), there have never been good, well-supported, cost-effective solutions for connecting those directly to Linux systems for routing that could compete with a basic Juniper or Cisco (or Adtran or ...) on price and ease of use. When you start talking about SONET links (OC-3 and up), Linux AFAIK doesn't handle things like protected paths and the like, and then you also quickly pass the performance capability of commodity hardware. Newer WAN circuits are using Ethernet, but you need OAM (which Linux doesn't support) to properly manage them as a replacement for traditional telco circuits. "Real" routers (aka Juniper and Cisco) use hardware-based forwarding that can run at line rate for 1G, 10G, and 100G interfaces. Dynamic routing has always been pretty weak in Linux as well. I have a few systems running Quagga for various purposes, but it is not nearly as powerful and flexible as a "traditional" router. Now, Juniper routers all run FreeBSD, but that's only on the routing engine (where the management and routing daemons run), not the forwarding engine (where the actual packet forwarding takes place). Juniper wrote all their own routing, PPP management, etc. daemons from scratch. It is kind of funny when you spend $100K+ on a router that has a Celeron 850 CPU and a whopping 20G hard drive. :-) I have lots of Linux servers, a few other old Unix servers, and a couple of Linux firewalls, but all my routers are Juniper. I've been working for small ISPs for 14 years, and I've never really seen a time where I would try to push Linux into serious routing. It costs too much on the low end and can't handle the performance on the high end. -- Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
