Steve Bertrand wrote:
Hi all,
First off, sorry for being so verbose, but any reply to any portion will
help me!
I was referred to this list from over at -isp/-questions after a
question I asked regarding the viability of an ISP using Quagga under
FreeBSD as a border router.
Many suggested OpenBGP and OpenOSPF as alternatives, but for now, I'll
stick with Quagga as it makes it easier for me, and other staff to
follow the Cisco-style configuration.
I have a few questions to ask however.
Here is my scenario and minimum requirements:
- two upstreams, BGP, accepting default-originate only, advertising my
/21 v4 and /32 v6
- 8 Ethernet interfaces
- two of said interfaces will be under the control of mpd4,
multi-linking two ADSL connections
- one will be connected to a 100Mbps fibre-to-Ethernet converter for a
LANx connection
- rest will be to a mix of 100Mb and 1000Mb switches, and behind those:
-- ~50 SDSL 1Mbps clients
-- ~6 Port Master 3's, 48 56K modems per
-- a few very heavily utilized DNS servers
-- about 300 websites across about 10 servers
-- a handful of co-lo boxes
-- an email infrastructure that realizes ~1 million emails per day
-- other things I've forgotten
What I'd like to know beyond learning (from this list) that anything
more than a dual-core is futile, what hardware should I be looking at? I
already have my router config pretty well done, on a flash memory card,
so in particular:
- is 64 bit CPU advantageous for anything more than the 4GB memory limit
I am no authority on this but I'd like to theorize (maybe someone will
enlighten me afterwards);
It could be beneficial for v6 processing but then i think you might be
hurt more from pushing/popping "twice" as much data on the stack the on
a context switch. You will be doing a lot of those, unless you use polling.
- is there a benefit to having more than 2GB of memory, and if so, what
are said benefits
Not unless you want to pull in the entire world through those bgp peers,
but since you use default-originate only, this shouldn't be a problem.
But that could imply that you are going to do attempt active load
balancing on those two peer links. If so, you should be aware that such
load balancing must be done manually by some other method (pf? ng?)
- is there a specific motherboard that I should look at
One with the least amount of IRQ's that need to be shared with your
ethernets.
You might want to consider AMD cpu's with enormous caches and low memory
latency (but also sometimes lower bandwidth). There will be a lot of
tiny packets that go in and out of memory, not large chunks. One could
say you would benefit more from a speedy sportster than a U-Haul truck.
The large caches would benefit you on all those context switches.
- is there specific NIC's I should look at (of course, dual or quad
1Gbps, but what brand/model)
Intel!
Intel?
oh yeah, Intel.
Essentially, I'd like a board with at *least* 6 PCI-X slots, and perhaps
8 RAM slots (if I can find justification that my router will work better
with up to 16GB of memory).
I can't think of a reason why it would go faster with 16GB of memory.
Memory for packets live in kernel space. Usable kernel address space
isn't big as it has to be shared with application address space.
On the software side, many people suggested OpenBGP to me as opposed to
Quagga, but I really didn't hear any 'technical' reason as to the
recommendation, so I'm *very* interested to hear of any benchmarks or
personal experience from anyone who has switched from one to the other.
I haven't had the pleasure of using OpenBGPD much as it was not
available when i used Quagga. Quagga has several architectural issues
involving importing lots of routes. Way back then, Quagga could
disconnect peers just simply because the initial route "flooding" took
too much time. Peer communication (keep alives) and route
importing/structure updates were not separate threads.
Also Quagga used up a lot more memory for it's structures for no gain.
These things might have changed.
But OpenBGPD doesn't look like an alternative for you, if you are using
ipv6 as it only supports ipv4 route distribution (according to man pages)
Another thing...what do you recommend as far as measuring pps and Kbps
within FreeBSD?
Thanks in advance for any advice whatsoever!
Steve
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--
Sten Daniel Soersdal
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