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jpd
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 877
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 Posted: Sat Mar 19, 2005 8:07 pm Post subject:
Re: Best router solution
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Begin <1ad1e8b9.0503161513.17bdf56c@posting.google.com>
On 2005-03-16, Ghazan Haider <ghazan.haider@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | Wow, this just turned into a flamewar. Fabulous.
[massive snip] |
And all that triggered by claiming something (well, obsd) to be ``the
best'', even while restricted to some area. It is a bit of a pet peeve,
but I'm certainly not the only one to harbour it: ``There Is No Best''.
obsd may well suit your needs. It may have a lot of pros going for it,
and all its competitors have only cons (which is not the case here, but
I digress), but claiming a ``the best'' is too simplistic and reeks of
k1dd13n3ss and cola affiliation.
| Quote: | Now continuing the flame, and deconstructing your answers:
Begin <1ad1e8b9.0503141347.204b487d@posting.google.com
On 2005-03-14, Ghazan Haider <ghazan.haider@gmail.com> wrote:
OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform.
Only if you restrict your routing needs to no more networking than obsd
understands. And in that there's a few other contenders as well.
It has the potential.
And so do many others.
For the networks that OpenBSD DOES understand, it can potentially be
the cheapest and most scalable platform. I continue saying potential
since I've never implemented one, in theory it seems exciting. You
keep saying its no better, no better than what?
|
Nice turnaround, well done. Your ``the best'' implies that it is better
than what? All the others? Then why isn't it the last man left standing?
``It has the potential'' is a meaningless promise in this context.
No, I'm saying that there's more candidates than just this one for a
``the best'' label, implicitly referring to what I lined out above: It
may very well be a good router. Or an Excellent router. Whatever. But
there is no single universal ``the best'', except in myth.
[snippety]
| Quote: | I WAS talking about router hardware and not workstation. OpenBSD
doesnt have to be installed on 'router' hardware only to act as a
router. PC components can be used to make a router. Next you mention
reliability.
|
And so I did.
| Quote: | You make no mention of how and why PC crap is crap.
|
This is the same as lamenting that I'm not specifying why eg cisco
has a bigger market share than obsd in the router market. There's
simply too many factors to mention here.
But I can give you a few: Take a router, and put it in some remote
location a couple of hundred km away in a secure(d) location, or at a
clients premises or something. Now try to access its bios through a
modem. You can do that with a cisco[1]
| Quote: | You
just assume, its not 'router hardware' so its gotta be crap.
|
Well, no. It's peecee hardware, so I know it is crap. Some of it is less
crappier, but it's been crap for what? 20 years? It has become much
faster in those years, and has gained a couple of features, such as a
clock, but still is crap. Here's why: The most widely used OS on such
contraptions, introduced well after that particular feature had become
standard on the class of machines, still can't make that clock tick
faster than 18.2 ticks a second, making accurate timekeeping a joke.
This kind of thing is very common with that OS. The very fact that this
OS is what most by far hardware of that class run, makes that many a
manufacturer --trying to keep costs down and margin up-- takes that as
the baseline to reach. They hardly ever reach further. Thus keeping the
crap down with its ilk. Crap breeds Crap.
So yes, peecees are utter and complete crap. And we run the world on it.
Great, innit?
| Quote: | Funny my
'pc crap hardware' OpenBSD firewall has an uptime in excess of 200
days, never given me a hardware problem,
|
So you were lucky. Relatively. I still remember when a fellow un*x
afficionado on irc was really sad. He lamented that there'd been a power
outage long enough to outlast the UPSen, and so everything had powered
off. Including a VAX11/750 with an uptime well in excess of five years.
Even un*x boxen, including mine --reaching uptimes of a year or
more without a sweat, the power company willing-- are relatively
unstable in that light. Nevermind that ye average peecee with the usual
excuse-for-an-os has been positively powercycling like a tornado in
comparison.
| Quote: | and was a heck of a lot of
cheaper than 'hardware' firewalls, some of which really have PC
components in them. Cisco must have been completely nuts putting a 286
in a pix.
|
They didn't. Their execs saw a product they wanted to sell and bought
the company. They do that more often. Recently they'd bought linksys
for their el-cheapo low-low-low end routing thingummies. This is one of
the few (the only one?) that hasn't actually been rebranded as cisco
after acquisition. Understandably. Altough I don't know what chip is in
there, the newer pixen (cute little boxes) aren't quite peecee hardware
anymore.
| Quote: | I am aware of the hardware limitations of the x86, and all its
inefficiencies. I only mentioned price.
And I said that it isn't as cheap as you implied and now explicitly
said, for you need more hardware to achieve at least the same level of
reliability as some more usually used routing hardware. Cisco still has
quite a bit of market while being bloody expensive even with all the
extra features that peecee stuff simply doesn't have, or is only slowly
starting to acquire, AND their falling ios quality. Still, with all the
*BSDs and l*n*x*n Out There having Lots Of Potential In The Routing
Arena, it doesn't seem to matter much. How come?
Hmm two or three more points there to refute, one point per paragraph
could make our discussion clearer.
x86 hardware can be efficient and reliable.
|
Efficient only in the sense of production volume; there's 20+ years
of cruft there, and they started with a Broken As Designed chip, too.
About the only decent thing in the original PC was the Z80 SIO, that
that's been long gone.
| Quote: | As for reliability, plenty
of x86 servers exist, at nice prices too I must mention. Cisco is
expensive because they never used commodity PC hardware, designed
their own so their IP remains exclusive. They couldve based their OS
on the plethora of OSes out there at the time, but they needed to
build IP, and they did.
|
I think their needs were a bit different than the picture you paint here.
At the time there was no good real time os (dos doesn't even count as
an OS, at all) that fits in cut-to-the-bone hardware optimized for one
thing and one thing only: switching packets.
The IP bit might've been a nice addition, but it wasn't the primary goal.
| Quote: | Thats why they can jack up prices so high now,
cisco technicians only know IOS. IOS only runs on cisco hardware, and
cisco hardware only executes IOS which is only available through
smartnet, which is expensive as hell. The routing market is
monopolized by cisco, so technicians must learn cisco to get into it,
and once theres a technician base, companies must buy cisco to
leverage that. Its a way to make money.
|
That sure is. I've heard some very nice (for the stockholders) numbers
to be their margins, but paying through the nose for their hardware has
its advantages: You can buy the exact same hardware ten years after its
initial release. Nevermind that you'll be paying the same price, or that
the hardware is hopelessly outdated. For some shops this is important.
I agree they're expensive, and the software updates are way too
expensive, with quality falling. Still, they won't go bust in a day, and
that too is a big plus. Imagine: Oops! Our core network supplier has
gone bust! Now entire countries must plan to replace their entire body
of routing hardware with something from another vendor (provided one
will be there to cater to that volume). How soon? That depends on the
amount of hardware everybody has in stock locally. Oh, and with demand
suddenly seeking alternative sources, prices will soar. Oops.
Margin on such stuff is usually not very important for the buyer, since
even double the price for the hardware is not noticable in the total
bill once you calculate in the traffic involved.
| Quote: | Go grab an IBM xSeries 206, and check its reliability.
|
I don't know about the 206. I do know about netfinity 4[05]00R and
xSeries 34[05]. They're nice, relatively, altough the BIOS could use a
good knock over the head and a ton of features added, as well as a good
kick in the butt (it is slooooooow to boot). Otherwise, it is fairly
good, as peecee crap for its timeframe goes. The add-in maintenance
stuff understandably doesn't run on intel but on powerpc, and if you
have it, it seems to be nice, but barely interoperable. BIOS upgrade and
maintenance tools are too micros~1 biassed for my taste and needs, and
idiosyncratic at best. ``mule-type stubborn'' and quite useless is more
often seen. But given the other stuff I get to deal with, it is doable.
| Quote: | Lastly, I
should mention OpenBSD runs on more than x86 hardware. It can run on
similar PPC and MIPS chips, and not being IOS, will be free, while
with OpenBSD people would be free to choose their hardware and
architectures.
|
.... as availability allows. Which is pretty much the weak point.
| Quote: | Why doesnt the world switch to OpenBSD as a routing OS? Because it
doesnt support in a standard way the various routing protocols, until
now..... possibly.
|
Yeah, well, I'd like better hardware, too. But I don't see it a coming
too soon. Maybe if the mac mini becomes a real hit. But it is a bit
short on both network connectivity and expandability for a router.
[snip]
| Quote: | BGP is a big name indeed. Hard to sell a high capacity router without
this protocol. An OpenBSD router will likely be high-capacity, if its
run on a Pentium3 or dual-Athlon64 chips even. Before OpenOSPFD and
OpenBGPD, all we had really was routed, which provided RIP. Its quite
tough to make routers with RIP alone, although in my sample labs, I
setup my Pentium1s and sparcstations as static routers, and they
worked beautifully. All ethernet, tokenring, SLIP and ATM. What was
missing really was the routing protocols. Now we have BGP and a
promise of OSPF, which, will be big news to me when released. Apart
from the hardly-used IS-IS, I'll have a nice routing platform... given
|
And IPX, and SNA, and appletalk, and... If you're serious about
enterprise networking and routing that is.
| Quote: | they can redistribute routes between the protocols with ease. OpenBSD
being free software, would not die a corporate's death... and after
OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD will have a big edge over other BSDs and Linux
in routing protocols.
|
Not really. All routing protocols really do is run the routing protocol,
and insert entries in the routing table, dynamically. More specifically,
it doesn't do the actual routing and switching of packets. This means
that any such program, as soon as it is open source, can be relatively
easily ported to most anything else.
I'd personally not run OpenBGPd on[2] OpenBSD, or even NetBSD. I'd prefer
FreeBSD, and not simply because I like that better as my dayly OS, (that
too, of course), but because of netgraph.
| Quote: | Being able to run on commodity hardware, will be
scalable and cheap.
|
Cheap only as far as the stuff happens to not be crap, or you're willing
to settle for maintaining crap. But I've explained that already.
Scalability only as far as the architecture can keep up. I mean, there
is no way you can get decent packets/second rates on 10gigabit speeds
out of even quad athlons. It isn't just megahertzen on the cpu or
even number of cpus. There's a reason for the existence of Content
Addressable Memory, multiple backplanes with bandwidths fit to build
contemporary dinosaurs with, and routing caches down to the port level
on ``real'' routing and switching hardware. And that with cpus that
seem very low on MHzen by contemporary standards[3].
There is _some_ merit in routing hardware being non-cheap, else nobody'd
put up with it. Some of it is even technical in nature.
| Quote: | Combine the two and for many general purposes,
including Internet backbone routing, OpenBSD can quite possibly.... be
the best router.
Thats what I meant to say. I can clarify that further on request.
|
And I still think you're up with your head in the clouds. I think I
clarified that. :-)
[snip]
| Quote: | I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
If you know lots about I'm sure you could try and help with the project.
[snip!]
Once again, I'm saying:
"Hey cool, we have this project. Maybe OpenBSD can be in yadda and
yadda markets and possibly beat the other products in feasibility.
Cant wait for OSPF".
And youre saying: "Stop whining, if you want so and so, go program,
else shut up".
|
Make that s/else shut up/then you'll get what you can't wait for that much
faster/. And yes, I can get away with that argument, just as much as you,
since it was implicit in the original statement and not spelled out.
More so than you, in fact, since I wrote it. :-)
| Quote: | Think of what you said in which newsgroup.
|
I know in which newsgroup I'm posting. It is related to a volunteer-
driven project. Such projects generally only thrive because people
contribute (time to) code, and bugreports, and whatnot, to them.
Stating you want something is cool. Making it happen is mucho cooler.
| Quote: | biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
IPv6 is big on IS-IS. But who still runs RIPv1? Still, you seem to be
happy it is available.
Who uses RIP? How about EVERYONE with Windows 2000, and EVERYONE with
Windows XP Pro?
Hm, I've got a network full of that but no RIP in sight. I'm not letting
those things route anything, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.
You should give it a shot. Although I'm using a cisco as the router,
its RIP redistribution lets all clients know where the default route
is,
|
Yech. Sorry, I don't like that. I'm using DHCP for that anyway. :-)
| Quote: | and where other internal networks of mine are. I dont have to
configure each win2k and winxp machines anymore. Couple that with
dhcp, it makes maintenance of large scale windows boxen, and switching
ISPs easy.
|
Done that twice on static routing. Still using static routing. Hey, it's
only a /24, not such a big deal. :-)
| Quote: | Any MCSE knows that c'mon.
[snip]
Come on! Any MCSE knows that!
|
I'm not a MCSE, and I really have no intention to become one. Or come
near one, for that matter. Minesweeper is, even without a certificate,
brain-numbing enough as it is.
[snip]
| Quote: | But not too slightly-informed. If thats naiive, you can educate all
the spectators of this group including of course myself.
|
Oh, I think there's a couple more people in the froup that know about
the ``there is no best'' mantra. :-)
[snip]
| Quote: | A bit of an and. It was more of OpenBSD as a general router than
kicking ciscos ass, but I did mention kicking ciscos ass in price in
the OP, and in hardware compatibility in this post. cisco makes
firewalls. OpenBSD can be a firewall, better than ciscos IMHO. OpenBSD
|
Well, yes and no. In commercial support cisco is hard to beat. Writing
firewall software from scratch, OpenBSD has done more often and better.
| Quote: | cant be a router primarily because of the lack of routing protocols,
which it now has.... the rest is a matter of debate. I have my side.
|
Fine. I contend that just talking routing protocols alone does not a
router make.
[1] I'm not counting PIXes here. I don't know about those, nor do I want to.
Besides, we're talking routers, not dedicated firewalls.
[2] Notice absense of linux here.
[3] Or should I say, ``intel marketing standards''?
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l . |
|
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Ghazan Haider
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 10
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| Posted: Wed Mar 16, 2005 10:13 pm Post subject:
Re: Best router solution
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Wow, this just turned into a flamewar. Fabulous.
Heres what I meant with my original post:
We've all been using openbsd, all been using ciscos here and there.
Zebra has been existing on unixen for a while, been rather crap in
usage. Tried quagga, not too different. But OpenBGPD seems like a good
direction. It sounds simpler and more reliable than zebra. I might
have the confidence to use it in a production system, might have the
confidence to approach the manager with this solution rather than a
cisco 3700, if we need a local net vs BGP peering to multiple uplinks
and such. The whole point of OpenBGPD seems to be BGP on OpenBSD. The
whole point of BGP is an exterior routing protocol, that connects
autonomous systems together. That places an importance of other
interior routing protocols on OpenBSD to make it a complete solution,
a router between an AS at BGP peers.
So OpenOSPFD is being constructed, and RIP already exists through
routed. That for once allows us to view OpenBSD, from its usual image
as a great firewall OS, to a free reliable router. The number of
routing protocols is limited, and OpenBSD can now cover the big ones
except EIGRP and IS-IS... having well-supported the common OSPF, BGP
and RIP operations (when OpenOSPFD is complete). I've tried using my
pile o pentiums at home as routers to create larger networks of OSPF
and BGP, zebra is simply difficult for me, never really worked well
even with the basic operations. Maybe OpenBSD can now act as a good
general router. Even better since I can directly connect my OpenBSD to
tokenring, FDDI, ATM (only one card supported), ethernet, WLAN,
frame-relay and ADSL networks, and call it a router. The cost will be
great compared to a cisco 3700 with similar interfaces, will be better
scalable, and being a BSD, I could do more with it.
Heres what you heard:
Another victory for BSD!. Now we can crush cisco completely, theyre
dead anyway. Too pricey for what they do, for what OpenBSD does for
free already. OpenBSD might be the best router of all.
Theres a difference between the two. I'm being both a user and a
well-wisher. You cant make me choose there.
Now continuing the flame, and deconstructing your answers:
| Quote: | Begin <1ad1e8b9.0503141347.204b487d@posting.google.com
On 2005-03-14, Ghazan Haider <ghazan.haider@gmail.com> wrote:
OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform.
Only if you restrict your routing needs to no more networking than obsd
understands. And in that there's a few other contenders as well.
It has the potential.
And so do many others.
|
For the networks that OpenBSD DOES understand, it can potentially be
the cheapest and most scalable platform. I continue saying potential
since I've never implemented one, in theory it seems exciting. You
keep saying its no better, no better than what?
| Quote: | Hardware
will be cheap,
If you're serious about routing the hardware will be such that you'll
have to buy at least double the hardware than what you really need:
every router with a hot-standby. peecee hardware is mediocre at best.
For $300 CDN I can buy an Athlon64 CPU, motherboard and ram. Show me
equivalent PPC, ARM, MIPS or SPARC chips.
I thought we were talking router hardware, not workstation components?
I'm not disputing that the crap is cheap. I'm saying the cheap crap is
still crap, and for reliability you need some sort of workaround for
that. And that is assuming all the world is ethernet, which it isn't
quite, just yet.
|
I WAS talking about router hardware and not workstation. OpenBSD
doesnt have to be installed on 'router' hardware only to act as a
router. PC components can be used to make a router. Next you mention
reliability. You make no mention of how and why PC crap is crap. You
just assume, its not 'router hardware' so its gotta be crap. Funny my
'pc crap hardware' OpenBSD firewall has an uptime in excess of 200
days, never given me a hardware problem, and was a heck of a lot of
cheaper than 'hardware' firewalls, some of which really have PC
components in them. Cisco must have been completely nuts putting a 286
in a pix.
| Quote: | I can also buy 5 Pentium1 machines for $50 bucks... IBM brand. Each
one gives a better kick than a cisco 2600, almost like a 3620. Show me
equivalent.
With those five pI boxen: How are you going to push packets down a T1 or
a E1 with them? With obsd? What is the extra cost in network attachment
hardware? So a 10BaseT WIC 2nd hand is ten times the price of a cheap
(and utterly crap) NIC for peecee. But how about, well, just about
anything else? xDSL? T* series? E* series? X.25? FR? OC? FC? &c.?
|
Try http://openbsd.org/i386.html and search for T1/E1. Now show me ONE
cisco router that supports arcnet networks.
| Quote: | I am aware of the hardware limitations of the x86, and all its
inefficiencies. I only mentioned price.
And I said that it isn't as cheap as you implied and now explicitly
said, for you need more hardware to achieve at least the same level of
reliability as some more usually used routing hardware. Cisco still has
quite a bit of market while being bloody expensive even with all the
extra features that peecee stuff simply doesn't have, or is only slowly
starting to acquire, AND their falling ios quality. Still, with all the
*BSDs and l*n*x*n Out There having Lots Of Potential In The Routing
Arena, it doesn't seem to matter much. How come?
|
Hmm two or three more points there to refute, one point per paragraph
could make our discussion clearer.
x86 hardware can be efficient and reliable. As for reliability, plenty
of x86 servers exist, at nice prices too I must mention. Cisco is
expensive because they never used commodity PC hardware, designed
their own so their IP remains exclusive. They couldve based their OS
on the plethora of OSes out there at the time, but they needed to
build IP, and they did. Thats why they can jack up prices so high now,
cisco technicians only know IOS. IOS only runs on cisco hardware, and
cisco hardware only executes IOS which is only available through
smartnet, which is expensive as hell. The routing market is
monopolized by cisco, so technicians must learn cisco to get into it,
and once theres a technician base, companies must buy cisco to
leverage that. Its a way to make money.
Go grab an IBM xSeries 206, and check its reliability. Lastly, I
should mention OpenBSD runs on more than x86 hardware. It can run on
similar PPC and MIPS chips, and not being IOS, will be free, while
with OpenBSD people would be free to choose their hardware and
architectures.
Why doesnt the world switch to OpenBSD as a routing OS? Because it
doesnt support in a standard way the various routing protocols, until
now..... possibly.
| Quote: | and OS lean, while networking is top notch, and BGP4
exists and works well...
How often do _you_ need BGP?
Not too often. I'll bet the developers of openbgpd dont _need_ it all
the time either, so whats your point?
BGP is a big name, but just $feature on $os doesn't get you a complete
router. Let alone TEH BEST!!1 ROUTER!!1! EVER!1!!, which --I'm
exagerating, but still-- was just about the starting premise of your
OP[1]. If that wasn't what you ment to say, you've done a good job of
hiding it.
|
BGP is a big name indeed. Hard to sell a high capacity router without
this protocol. An OpenBSD router will likely be high-capacity, if its
run on a Pentium3 or dual-Athlon64 chips even. Before OpenOSPFD and
OpenBGPD, all we had really was routed, which provided RIP. Its quite
tough to make routers with RIP alone, although in my sample labs, I
setup my Pentium1s and sparcstations as static routers, and they
worked beautifully. All ethernet, tokenring, SLIP and ATM. What was
missing really was the routing protocols. Now we have BGP and a
promise of OSPF, which, will be big news to me when released. Apart
from the hardly-used IS-IS, I'll have a nice routing platform... given
they can redistribute routes between the protocols with ease. OpenBSD
being free software, would not die a corporate's death... and after
OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD will have a big edge over other BSDs and Linux
in routing protocols. Being able to run on commodity hardware, will be
scalable and cheap. Combine the two and for many general purposes,
including Internet backbone routing, OpenBSD can quite possibly.... be
the best router.
Thats what I meant to say. I can clarify that further on request.
| Quote: | RIP can be achieved by routed, but what about the rest?
Look up gated, the non-free version. They sell for $unspecified_platform
but also sell source. Of course it'd be nice to have free and open
networking software, but it doesn't write itself.
I can also look up cisco routers. Once again youre missing the point
of either this post or this newsgroup. Or why people make free
software. Search for the cathederal and the bazaar on google.
You asked for routing solutions, so I pointed to where you could get
them, even (presumably) for obsd. So they're not free. So help fix that.
In the meantime, if you want a solution now, there's where you can get
it.
Since this isn't an advocacy group but a place where, AIUI, one can
discuss facts (compare cola), I don't see much wrong in pointing you to
somewhere as close as you can currently get to a workable answer. Why
you insist on construing that as me missing your point, well, that in
all honesty is indeed a bit beyond me.
|
Oh sorry. It seemed to me you meant RTFM, or 'get lost you dont know'.
I've actually been looking at gated. Somehow OpenBSD and its
associated projects gives me a better feeling of reliability. Also
cant find gated for OpenBSD, they didnt answer my email on that. I was
able to get demo versions for Solaris.
| Quote: | I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
If you know lots about I'm sure you could try and help with the project.
If I knew even more, I could make another fork of BSD. If I knew
better still, I could create a free IOS for use on all platforms.
If you knew better you'd know that forking yet again might not be such a
swell idea, just as the original obsd fork wasn't born out of love for
mankind, either.
|
Once again, I'm saying:
"Hey cool, we have this project. Maybe OpenBSD can be in yadda and
yadda markets and possibly beat the other products in feasibility.
Cant wait for OSPF".
And youre saying: "Stop whining, if you want so and so, go program,
else shut up".
Think of what you said in which newsgroup.
| Quote: | biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
IPv6 is big on IS-IS. But who still runs RIPv1? Still, you seem to be
happy it is available.
Who uses RIP? How about EVERYONE with Windows 2000, and EVERYONE with
Windows XP Pro?
Hm, I've got a network full of that but no RIP in sight. I'm not letting
those things route anything, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.
|
You should give it a shot. Although I'm using a cisco as the router,
its RIP redistribution lets all clients know where the default route
is, and where other internal networks of mine are. I dont have to
configure each win2k and winxp machines anymore. Couple that with
dhcp, it makes maintenance of large scale windows boxen, and switching
ISPs easy.
| Quote: | Any MCSE knows that c'mon.
Oh, was it in the minesweeper manual, then?
|
Yes. If you call this a minesweeper manual:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prcc_tcp_lgpn.asp
Come on! Any MCSE knows that!
| Quote: | A better question is who runs IS-IS on ipv6?
surfnet did, for one. Who else I don't know, I've been a bit out of that
scene lately.
|
It has its presence in some quarters. I wouldnt call it the most
popular, especally since it doesnt use IP.
| Quote: | You missed the point of my post. I am a user. I'm also a supporter and
part-tester. I do have a pile of old cisco routers I can use for
routing purposes... and I do use them. That does not mean I am barred
from discussing routing on OpenBSD.
Oh, is that what you wanted to say. It looked more like a slightly-
informed and rather naive ``all hail $foo'' posting, but hey, now that
you mention it. Having a pile of ciscos is of course also good.
And yes, you still may discuss obsd, of course.
|
All hail BGP and OSPF on OpenBSD! :)
But not too slightly-informed. If thats naiive, you can educate all
the spectators of this group including of course myself.
| Quote: |
Will I need it? If not, should I just not ask questions about it on
the newsgroups? Well, I dont need it, and I will ask questions because
I'd like to be in a position where I'll need OpenBSD as a
multiprotocol router. I'm a well-wisher.
So, was your OP[1] a well-wishing post or a question for information
on when openospf+openrip+openbgp was going to kick ciscos ass on their
own hardware? Or is it `and'?
|
A bit of an and. It was more of OpenBSD as a general router than
kicking ciscos ass, but I did mention kicking ciscos ass in price in
the OP, and in hardware compatibility in this post. cisco makes
firewalls. OpenBSD can be a firewall, better than ciscos IMHO. OpenBSD
cant be a router primarily because of the lack of routing protocols,
which it now has.... the rest is a matter of debate. I have my side. |
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jpd
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 877
|
| Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2005 7:25 pm Post subject:
Re: Best router solution
|
|
|
Begin <1ad1e8b9.0503141347.204b487d@posting.google.com>
On 2005-03-14, Ghazan Haider <ghazan.haider@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform.
Only if you restrict your routing needs to no more networking than obsd
understands. And in that there's a few other contenders as well.
It has the potential.
|
And so do many others.
| Quote: | Hardware
will be cheap,
If you're serious about routing the hardware will be such that you'll
have to buy at least double the hardware than what you really need:
every router with a hot-standby. peecee hardware is mediocre at best.
For $300 CDN I can buy an Athlon64 CPU, motherboard and ram. Show me
equivalent PPC, ARM, MIPS or SPARC chips.
|
I thought we were talking router hardware, not workstation components?
I'm not disputing that the crap is cheap. I'm saying the cheap crap is
still crap, and for reliability you need some sort of workaround for
that. And that is assuming all the world is ethernet, which it isn't
quite, just yet.
| Quote: | I can also buy 5 Pentium1 machines for $50 bucks... IBM brand. Each
one gives a better kick than a cisco 2600, almost like a 3620. Show me
equivalent.
|
With those five pI boxen: How are you going to push packets down a T1 or
a E1 with them? With obsd? What is the extra cost in network attachment
hardware? So a 10BaseT WIC 2nd hand is ten times the price of a cheap
(and utterly crap) NIC for peecee. But how about, well, just about
anything else? xDSL? T* series? E* series? X.25? FR? OC? FC? &c.?
| Quote: | I am aware of the hardware limitations of the x86, and all its
inefficiencies. I only mentioned price.
|
And I said that it isn't as cheap as you implied and now explicitly
said, for you need more hardware to achieve at least the same level of
reliability as some more usually used routing hardware. Cisco still has
quite a bit of market while being bloody expensive even with all the
extra features that peecee stuff simply doesn't have, or is only slowly
starting to acquire, AND their falling ios quality. Still, with all the
*BSDs and l*n*x*n Out There having Lots Of Potential In The Routing
Arena, it doesn't seem to matter much. How come?
| Quote: | and OS lean, while networking is top notch, and BGP4
exists and works well...
How often do _you_ need BGP?
Not too often. I'll bet the developers of openbgpd dont _need_ it all
the time either, so whats your point?
|
BGP is a big name, but just $feature on $os doesn't get you a complete
router. Let alone TEH BEST!!1 ROUTER!!1! EVER!1!!, which --I'm
exagerating, but still-- was just about the starting premise of your
OP[1]. If that wasn't what you ment to say, you've done a good job of
hiding it.
| Quote: | RIP can be achieved by routed, but what about the rest?
Look up gated, the non-free version. They sell for $unspecified_platform
but also sell source. Of course it'd be nice to have free and open
networking software, but it doesn't write itself.
I can also look up cisco routers. Once again youre missing the point
of either this post or this newsgroup. Or why people make free
software. Search for the cathederal and the bazaar on google.
|
You asked for routing solutions, so I pointed to where you could get
them, even (presumably) for obsd. So they're not free. So help fix that.
In the meantime, if you want a solution now, there's where you can get
it.
Since this isn't an advocacy group but a place where, AIUI, one can
discuss facts (compare cola), I don't see much wrong in pointing you to
somewhere as close as you can currently get to a workable answer. Why
you insist on construing that as me missing your point, well, that in
all honesty is indeed a bit beyond me.
| Quote: | I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
If you know lots about I'm sure you could try and help with the project.
If I knew even more, I could make another fork of BSD. If I knew
better still, I could create a free IOS for use on all platforms.
|
If you knew better you'd know that forking yet again might not be such a
swell idea, just as the original obsd fork wasn't born out of love for
mankind, either.
| Quote: | biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
IPv6 is big on IS-IS. But who still runs RIPv1? Still, you seem to be
happy it is available.
Who uses RIP? How about EVERYONE with Windows 2000, and EVERYONE with
Windows XP Pro?
|
Hm, I've got a network full of that but no RIP in sight. I'm not letting
those things route anything, though. Maybe that has something to do with it.
| Quote: | Any MCSE knows that c'mon.
|
Oh, was it in the minesweeper manual, then?
| Quote: | A better question is who runs IS-IS on ipv6?
|
surfnet did, for one. Who else I don't know, I've been a bit out of that
scene lately.
| Quote: | You missed the point of my post. I am a user. I'm also a supporter and
part-tester. I do have a pile of old cisco routers I can use for
routing purposes... and I do use them. That does not mean I am barred
from discussing routing on OpenBSD.
|
Oh, is that what you wanted to say. It looked more like a slightly-
informed and rather naive ``all hail $foo'' posting, but hey, now that
you mention it. Having a pile of ciscos is of course also good.
And yes, you still may discuss obsd, of course.
| Quote: | Will I need it? If not, should I just not ask questions about it on
the newsgroups? Well, I dont need it, and I will ask questions because
I'd like to be in a position where I'll need OpenBSD as a
multiprotocol router. I'm a well-wisher.
|
So, was your OP[1] a well-wishing post or a question for information
on when openospf+openrip+openbgp was going to kick ciscos ass on their
own hardware? Or is it `and'?
[1] s/er/ing/
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l . |
|
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Ghazan Haider
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 10
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 8:47 pm Post subject:
Re: Best router solution
|
|
|
| Quote: | OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform.
Only if you restrict your routing needs to no more networking than obsd
understands. And in that there's a few other contenders as well.
|
It has the potential.
| Quote: |
Hardware
will be cheap,
If you're serious about routing the hardware will be such that you'll
have to buy at least double the hardware than what you really need:
every router with a hot-standby. peecee hardware is mediocre at best.
|
For $300 CDN I can buy an Athlon64 CPU, motherboard and ram. Show me
equivalent PPC, ARM, MIPS or SPARC chips.
I can also buy 5 Pentium1 machines for $50 bucks... IBM brand. Each
one gives a better kick than a cisco 2600, almost like a 3620. Show me
equivalent.
I am aware of the hardware limitations of the x86, and all its
inefficiencies. I only mentioned price.
| Quote: |
and OS lean, while networking is top notch, and BGP4
exists and works well...
How often do _you_ need BGP?
|
Not too often. I'll bet the developers of openbgpd dont _need_ it all
the time either, so whats your point?
| Quote: |
RIP can be achieved by routed, but what about the rest?
Look up gated, the non-free version. They sell for $unspecified_platform
but also sell source. Of course it'd be nice to have free and open
networking software, but it doesn't write itself.
|
I can also look up cisco routers. Once again youre missing the point
of either this post or this newsgroup. Or why people make free
software. Search for the cathederal and the bazaar on google.
| Quote: |
I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
If you know lots about I'm sure you could try and help with the project.
|
If I knew even more, I could make another fork of BSD. If I knew
better still, I could create a free IOS for use on all platforms.
Heck if I knew even better, I could make reactos COMPLETELY compatible
with win32, and steal all that market.
If I knew better I could bring about world peace. Alas I dont.
If only.
| Quote: |
biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
IPv6 is big on IS-IS. But who still runs RIPv1? Still, you seem to be
happy it is available.
|
Who uses RIP? How about EVERYONE with Windows 2000, and EVERYONE with
Windows XP Pro?
Any MCSE knows that c'mon.
A better question is who runs IS-IS on ipv6?
| Quote: |
OpenBSD support much else on layer 3 beside IP and IPX?
Well, there's... uhm... I mean there's... uhm... ah wasn't there, uhm..?
Besides, what else is there that is still interesting? You've already
implicitly concluded that IP is the only thing you will ever need, and
that makes this question moot before you asked it.
|
So you CANT come up with another layer3 protocol OpenBSD supports? You
cant come up with CLNS, on which IS-IS runs?
You missed the point of my post. I am a user. I'm also a supporter and
part-tester. I do have a pile of old cisco routers I can use for
routing purposes... and I do use them. That does not mean I am barred
from discussing routing on OpenBSD.
I've installed OpenBSD in several production places, mostly as a
firewall. It's been successful with me. I like it. I'd like to be able
to do much more with such a reliable piece of hardware.
I'm also into routing protocols. Tried zebra and quagga on a pile of
old sparcstations, too many issues. OpenBGPD seems simple clean and
fast, and should be a reliable product like OpenBSD. Google around,
you'll notice I'm not the only one eyeing OpenBSD as a router. Zebra
does inter-protocol redistribution, but I dont know how OpenBGPD and
routed redistribute. Thats important since the protocol architecture
is changing here, along with the new OpenOSPFD. It matters to lets say
EVERYONE who wants a BSD-based router out there. Its not a silly
question. Ask anyone else who is studying for a CCIE.
Will I need it? If not, should I just not ask questions about it on
the newsgroups? Well, I dont need it, and I will ask questions because
I'd like to be in a position where I'll need OpenBSD as a
multiprotocol router. I'm a well-wisher. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
jpd
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 22 Feb 2005
Posts: 877
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:52 am Post subject:
Re: Best router solution
|
|
|
Begin <1ad1e8b9.0503140215.7a2cbe9d@posting.google.com>
On 2005-03-14, Ghazan Haider <ghazan.haider@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform.
|
Only if you restrict your routing needs to no more networking than obsd
understands. And in that there's a few other contenders as well.
| Quote: | Hardware
will be cheap,
|
If you're serious about routing the hardware will be such that you'll
have to buy at least double the hardware than what you really need:
every router with a hot-standby. peecee hardware is mediocre at best.
| Quote: | and OS lean, while networking is top notch, and BGP4
exists and works well...
|
How often do _you_ need BGP?
| Quote: | RIP can be achieved by routed, but what about the rest?
|
Look up gated, the non-free version. They sell for $unspecified_platform
but also sell source. Of course it'd be nice to have free and open
networking software, but it doesn't write itself.
| Quote: | I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
|
If you know lots about I'm sure you could try and help with the project.
| Quote: | biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
|
IPv6 is big on IS-IS. But who still runs RIPv1? Still, you seem to be
happy it is available.
| Quote: | OpenBSD support much else on layer 3 beside IP and IPX?
|
Well, there's... uhm... I mean there's... uhm... ah wasn't there, uhm..?
Besides, what else is there that is still interesting? You've already
implicitly concluded that IP is the only thing you will ever need, and
that makes this question moot before you asked it.
--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l . |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Ghazan Haider
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 14 Mar 2005
Posts: 10
|
| Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2005 9:15 am Post subject:
Best router solution
|
|
|
OpenBSD has the potential of being the best routing platform. Hardware
will be cheap, and OS lean, while networking is top notch, and BGP4
exists and works well...
RIP can be achieved by routed, but what about the rest? I'm personally
very curious about OpenOSPFD and impatient about it. OSPF is the
biggest interior routing protocol for many reasons. Apart from that
we'd be left with IS-IS, but really, who uses that anymore? And does
OpenBSD support much else on layer 3 beside IP and IPX?
So that leaves us with BGP, RIP and OSPF, two of which already exist.
How good is the redistribution between RIP and BGP compared to cisco?
Not many sites will be masochistic enough to do that, but its
important since OSPF to RIP and OSPF to BGP redistributions will work
similarly, and theyre more likely than RIP to BGP.
I'll be even more proud if OpenBGPD and OpenOSPFD can be compiled
cleanly for NetBSD and Linux.
Any thoughts or experiences with RIP-BGP redistribution? |
|
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