Inline response exist, On 12/26/13, Ray Soucy <r...@maine.edu> wrote: > You can build using commodity hardware and get pretty good results. > > I've had really good luck with Supermicro whitebox hardware, and > Intel-based network cards. The "Hot Lava Systems" cards have a nice > selection for a decent price if you're looking for SFP and SFP+ cards that > use Intel chipsets.
I like the supermicro as well however we have a couple of IBM x3250 with 2 pcie v3 x8 that are begging for a intel network card. > There might be some benefits in going with something like FreeBSD, but I > find that Linux has a lot more eyeballs on it making it much easier to > develop for, troubleshoot, and support. There are a few options if you > want to go the Linux route. This is very important to consider. I would be speculating, or even worse, expecting the same type of community support from the BSD verse that I have been getting from the linux community. > > Option 1: Roll your own OS. This takes quite a bit of effort, but if you > have the tallant to do it you can generally get exactly what you want. If Free/OpenBSD is ruled out, I could crack open the LFS project. You only have to do it once right? Or maybe just reach out to the gentoo community for a stripped version, and build outwards. > The biggest point of failure I've experienced with Linux-based routers on > whitebox hardware has been HDD failure. Other than that, the 100+ units > I've had deployed over the past 3+ years have been pretty much flawless. > SSD > Thankfully, they currently run an in-memory OS, so a disk failure only > affects logging. > If you want to build your own OS, I'll shamelessly plug a side project of > mine: RAMBOOT > > http://ramboot.org/ > > RAMBOOT makes use of the Ubuntu Core rootfs, and a modified boot process > (added into initramfs tools, so kernel updates generate the right kernel > automatically). Essentially, I use a kernel ramdisk instead of an HDD for > the root filesystem and "/" is mounted on "/dev/ram1". > > The bootflash can be removed while the system is running as it's only > mounted to save system configuration or update the OS. > > I haven't polished it up much, but there is enough there to get going > pretty quickly. Ummm, if it's ok with the community, can you kindly elaborate :). I am not too fond of Debian since my horrible experience with Squeeze Desktop. I would maybe like to try this using the combination of SSD, in memory, and Gentoo? > > You'll also want to pay attention to the settings you use for the kernel. > Linux is tuned as a desktop or server, not a router, so there are some > basics you should take care of (like disabling ICMP redirects, increasing > the ARP table size, etc). Totally strip it as much as possible. If anyone has a Gentoo stripped kernel config that they would like to share, please do :). > > I have some examples in: http://soucy.org/xorp/xorp-1.7-pre/TUNING > or http://soucy.org/tmp/netfilter.txt (more recent, but includes firewall > examples). Will definitely look into all your sites. > > Also a note of caution. I would stick with a longterm release of Linux. > I've had good experience with 2.6.32, and 3.10. I'm eager to use some of > the post-3.10 features, though, so I'm anxious for the next longterm branch > to be locked in. > We are comfy with 3.4 right now... > One of the biggest advantages is the low cost of hardware allows you to > maintain spare systems, reducing the time to service restoration in the > event of failure. Dependability-wise, I feel that whitebox Linux systems > are pretty much at Cisco levels these days, especially if running > in-memory. Really interested with the "in-memory", however, I would love to implement it using gentoo as mentioned above. Kind Regards, N.