[school-discuss] Alternatives to Cisco Routers (WAS: Success!)

[Richard Wraith <rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au>]

> I've got to brag about this, and this group seems like the ones that
> would care.
>
> We had an ethernet card die in a Cisco 3600 series router today. I
> don't have anything bad to say about the quality of Cisco products,
> but they are a bit *ahem* pricy, and specialty cards like this can't
> be bought off the shelf at your local computer store (so we're
> looking at a minimum of 1 week to get it replaced).
>
> Thanks to Linux (FREESCO), I replaced a big expensive Cisco router
> with a 5 year-old PC that was sitting in a storage cabinet.

Since the very beginning of our network in 1996 we have had a FreeBSD or
Linux machine as our router. We looked at Cisco and many other
alternatives and none could compare for $$ versus performance.

We have a very busy network with 13 class C subnets yet our FreeBSD and
now Linux router/firewall has barely ever shown a significant load
average. Routing performance has never been an issue.

At the minimum you need two network cards in the box - one for the
external link and one for the internal. We have four cards in our machine
as we have physically as well as logically subdivided our network.

Configuration has been no harder than for a Cisco box and yet far more
flexible. The cost has been way way lower. The two machines we have had in
the role (original one was a P166 with 64MB RAM, now an Athlon with 128MB)
have both performed flawlessly. Neither has any special hardware and we
only retired the first machine because it was getting to be five years old
and MAY have become unrealiable - but it hadn't yet. It was still handling
the load perfectly well.

Cheers,

Richard

-- 
Dr Richard Wraith                             rgw@trinity.unimelb.edu.au
Director of IT & T and the Trinity Learning Innovation Centre
Trinity College   Royal Parade   Parkville   3052   Victoria   Australia
tel: +61-3-9348 7112      mobile: 0417 361 093      fax: +61-3-9348 7498