Jeff Lasman wrote:
I'm rebuilding a core router today.
Lemme guess, we're not calling Cisco TAC!?!
(It used to be FreeBSD but the contractor that built it is no longer
available; I'm putting it on a targeted distribution of Debian from the
debian-501-i386-netinst.iso.
My experience with BSD (OpenBSD and FreeBSD) is that BSD takes a huge
pounding with very little resources and barely cracks a sweat.
From a support point of view, I've had greater success finding the
documentation I've needed, and when it didn't make sense, the people on
the listservs were really cool about telling me what I needed to
do/understand (as long as I made it clear that I was indeed trying to
read the support documentation).
BSD's ports system is nice, and some would argue, just as good (if not
better) than Linux's package management. (Personally, I'm a fan of
deb/apt-get).
From a functional point of view, what is this router going to do?
Simply NAT? BGP? Firewall? QoS? Are you moving from something like pf to
iptables?
It turns out the install is too large to fit on the 128mb flash drive I
used to use.
The system is single-drive pata.
Is there something wrong with the drive? Or are you wanting to change
distros so that you can support it easier?
I've got (lots of) old drives taken out of service, from 40G up, that I
can use, but I don't have service records on any of them <frown>.
Or I can drive to Frys in an hour or two and buy a new (smallest they've
got) pata drive.
Based on your experience, which is more likely to give me good service
in a core router?
Honestly, I've had lots of problems with just about every type of drive,
but Maxtors seem to be at the bottom of the rung and Seagates closer to
the top. No matter what the brand, though, if it has an orange/white
sticker that has a new "reduced" price, run the other way, as it was
likely returned to the store by someone else.
