Depends what you mean by "route." Linux, or other flavors of UNIX,
work reasonably well in RsD route servers with huge routing tables,
but limited numbers of peering interfaces and no forwarding
requirements.
In a small organization, these do not necessarily impose practical
limits. The major limit there is the time and skill needed for
support. Let's put it this way -- I am quite capable of designing
routers. I use commercial routers in my home office simply because I
have finite time, and I'd rather use my time for generating revenue
than doing administration. I do administer my UNIX boxes, because I
use them for development and it's productive for me to customize
them. My environment includes Mac, Wintel, and Sun, because either
someone supplies a particular platform and requires me to use it for
their work, or that I made a certain decision in the past (with
personal dollars) and found no compelling reason to discard a
particular architecture.
Conventional UNIX flavors are interrupt-driven. In general, real-time
operating systems are run-to-completion, because at a certain
real-time load (seen with forwarding, process control, etc.) the OS
cost of servicing interrupts is too high. Yes, JunOS is a UNIX
derivative, but with a radically rewritten kernel. Without any inside
knowledge, I would suspect that an open implementation that resembles
JunOS would be (at the lower levels) a pthreads interface to a Mach
kernel.
Again for large organizations, forwarding does lend itself to special
hardware, or at least independent processors. There's no reason that
the route processing for these couldn't live on UNIX/Linux.
>Why would you not trust a Linux box to route? What experience or
>documentation do you have that would lead you to believe that a properly
>configured Linux box could not or would not do the job. There are a lot of
>companies using Linux these days. One of largest distributed processing
>systems is based on large linux clusters, most of Mariott's reservation
>system is based on it. Lot's of ISP's use it as their core e-mail, and web
>systems, and I have seen some departmental use of Linux or Windows NT
>machines being used as routers.
>
>A cisco router is not that much different in architecture. At the highest
>level, It is a processor that runs a unix kernel based OS with some NIC or
>serial interfaces and an application designed specifically for routing. The
>real difference is in the software that runs on the router. There is no
>special ASIC's or processors on the router. IT is a computer (less intel
>pentium processor except in the PIX) w/o the added multimedia and I/O
>hardware, driven by a unix kernel running software , very similiar to any
>other computer. The real difference is in the application, or software it
>runs, not it's hardware architecure.
>
>My understanding is that some of the processors found in the router are the
>same that can be found in certain Apple or Macintosh PC's and other
>non-windows based cpu's.
>
>
>This is my humble opinion based on my limited knowledge of the router
>architecture. However I agree that it would not be appropriate to place a
>linux box at the core of your network there are certainly times or
>applications and solutions where it would be fine. It is not designed
>specifically for routing, but it will certainly do the job if simple routing
>is all that is needed.
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: William E. Gragido <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: 'anthony kim' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2001 10:47 PM
>Subject: RE: alternative to Cisco routers
>
>
>>Are you serious? You would use a Linux box in place of a router???? Are you
>>mad man? I mean, I am as much a fan of Linux as the next geek, however I
>>would not entrust routing/switching duties to it.
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
>>anthony kim
>>Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 7:24 PM
> >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>Subject: Re: alternative to Cisco routers
>>
>>
>>This is all well and good for the big time players, ISPs, big corps
>>yadda yadda yadda, and companies with cash to burn like so much old toilet
>>paper. The Small and Midsized Business market (SMB) almost always can
>>accomplish what they want with free Unix or Linux for layer 3 and
>>cheap stackable switches with or without 802.1q support.
>>
>>So my obligatory cisco alternative:
>>www.zebra.org
>>
>>On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 04:00:36PM -0600, William E. Gragido wrote:
>>>There ServerIronXL Layer 4-7 switches are pretty cool boxes as well.
>>>Foundry is also pretty nice in that their command line interface is
>awfully
>>>reminiscent of Cisco's. The transition from one to the other should not
>be
>>>too difficult.
>>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: Christopher Kolp [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>>>Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 3:41 PM
>>>To: 'Brant Stevens'; 'William E. Gragido'; 'Howard C. Berkowitz';
>>>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>Subject: RE: alternative to Cisco routers
>>>
>>>
>>>Foundry prices are killer and the performance is top notch.
>>>
>>>We're planning a roll out with 40 OC-12 POS. Guess who our preferred
>>>provider is?
>>>
>>>None other than foundry.
>>>
>>>-ck
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
>>>Brant Stevens
>>>Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 4:28 PM
>>>To: William E. Gragido; 'Howard C. Berkowitz'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>Subject: RE: alternative to Cisco routers
>>>
>>>
>>>Not to mention Foundry...
>>>
>>>Brant I. Stevens
>>>Internetwork Solutions Engineer
>>>Thrupoint, Inc.
>>>545 Fifth Avenue, 14th Floor
>>>New York, NY. 10017
>>>646-562-6540
>>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
>>>William E. Gragido
>>>Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 2:47 PM
>>>To: 'Howard C. Berkowitz'; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>Subject: RE: alternative to Cisco routers
>>>
>>>
>>>Riding on the coat tails of Howard's comments, there are also other
>players
>>>out there like Lucent(home of the Nexibit N64000 Terabit Switch Router
>and
>>>the Ascend product lines), Avici, Charlette's Web, Nortel etc., that offer
>>>carrier grade solutions.
>>>
>>>-----Original Message-----
>>>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
>>>Howard C. Berkowitz
>>>Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 1:20 PM
>>>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>Subject: Re: alternative to Cisco routers
>>>
>>>
>>>A few comments, in which I think I am being reasonably objective.
>>>
>>>On this list, people periodically speak of the joys of Cisco, because
>>>it offers end-to-end solutions. That is a very enterprise-oriented
>>>view.
>>>
>>>Much more than in the enterprise space, carriers/ISPs tend to _want_
>>>multivendor solutions. There are several reasons. They are
>>>protected, to some extent, from bugs in the hardware or software of a
>>>specific implementation. Next, if they have several qualified
>>>vendors, they can get some protection against delivery backlogs from
>>>one of them. The larger provider also can play competitive discount
>>>and service games with the vendors.
>>>
>>>In this market, Juniper has the advantage of having built a product
>>>as carrier-oriented from the ground up. There's a lot of bloat in IOS
>>>due to the perception or need for legacy, usually
>>>enterprise-oriented, features. Independent reviewers, such as the
>>>Tolly group, have indicated that Junipers may have as good or better
>>>throughput than equivalent Cisco products.
>>>
>>>No one vendor owns the entire carrier router space. Cisco's
>>>advertising that ninety-some percent of the traffic in the internet
>>>goes over the equipment of one company doesn't necessarily mean the
>>>core bandwidth, but that the traffic at some point hits an enterprise
>>>or carrier Cisco device. In any case, I prefer the variant of this
>>>slogan I saw in someone's .sig (hoping I don't hit a filter)
>>>"ninety-some percent of the p*rn*graphy in the Internet goes through
>>>the equipment of one company." Said comment could be equally true of
>>>Cisco's routers or Nortel's optics.
> >>
>>>Juniper and Cisco both make fine products.
>>>
>>>
>>>>John,
>>>>
>>>>I went to a BGP study session and the instructor said that major ISP use
>>>>Juniper router to run BGP. Hope this help. PEACE
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Raheem
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>From: John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>>Reply-To: John Chambers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>>>Subject: alternative to Cisco routers
>>>>>Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 08:09:59 -0500
>>>>>
>>>>>Anyone who have experience with Juniper routers would like to comment on
>>>>>its performance (M20 and 40
>>>>>series) in comparison to Cisco GSR 12000s. My company is in the process
>>>>>of evaluating Juniper products
>>>>>because we are not very happy with Cisco performance. Our router
>>>>>crashes almost every week which is
>>>>>unacceptable and Cisco didn't provide much help other than giving us
>>>> >buggy IOS code.
>>>>>
>>>
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>>
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