I remember meeting you now Graham, and being slightly amazed at your 'good'
NTL experience. I do think the 0800 dialup is one of the better deals
(though it would be nice to be able to use their 0845 1p/min service at same
time as a fallback, I made mistake of not opening up a 2nd user account and
0845 rejected me since I enabled 0800). I'm toying with ordering the broad
band service. it's just very much best not to need to make support calls (my
father had terrible trouble until I reset him up, using _none_ of the
NTLWorld s/w they provide) *grin*.
----- > As for routing, we get our BGP table from their Telehouse router
nowadays
> as the one at Daleside was a little under-specced to be doing that job. I
> suspect we weren't the only ones - now that the global route table has
> gone over 100k networks for the first time there's a lot of older routers
> complaining about RAM shortages. And Cisco RAM ain't cheap, either.
>
> [Thinks: to get back on-topic, I wonder what difference I'd have if I
> routed everything through a pair of Linux boxes running the LVS+heartbeat
> patched kernel, plus gated & zebra? It'd be easier to do firewalling,
> anyway...]
If it's you own company I'm sure it would work just as well, seems to me
Cisco's are so popular, as it's easier to set up their routing, than use
OSPF. You'ld be fine until some major network problem occured, in which
case all the outside Techie's using Cisco's will point fingers at you and
your non-kosha bit of kit, and your manager will get all concerned and cover
his ass.
I thought the prices of low end routers were coming down, making one of
those WAN card based systems, cost about as much, obviously for full BGP
peering you wouldn't worry about the RAM, and Dnet makes some good 4 port
100BaseT cards. There's some interesting rate limitting and queuing modules
in the kernel, but AFAIK the FreeBSD/OpenBSD code is more mature, and wider
used. Actually OpenBSD offers good IPSEC implementation and hardware
encryption, which makes it an interesting choice for VPNs and such like.
The main advantage for me would be improved manageability, not being au fait
with Cisco's, and totally lacking in expect(1) scripts to configure and
check on the things :)
I don't think you'ld want to run both gated & zebra, AFAIK zebra was an
attempt to supercede gated. Never tried zebra, when I did run gated it was
inorder to optimise some host routes to multi-homed servers, which were
accessed both other a LAN and a WAN. The multi-homing meant the local
network couldn't screw up the MAN/WAN access which was relied on by far
toooooo many ppl.
Rob
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