Hot Swap is hard to fully accomplish with PCs. Everyone needs a plan for how
maintenance will occur with minimal downtime.
For example, its prettty easy to buy a nice Rack case with redundant PS, but
how do you replace an overheating CPU?
A standard Rack PC does not have HotSwap CPUs, and it is inevitable that sooner
or later the Heatsink fan will fail or heat sink grease will harden.
And how does one troubleshoot that, on a live router? That is the negative of a
Linux self made Rack PC. But again, thats the reason for a hot spare router to
put in place, and a reason for scheduled maintenance to occur every couple
years after hours, when a 60 second outage is acceptable. As ISPs start to
become gloabal ISPs opperating in multiple time zones, it becomes tougher, to
find good times to do maintenance, but I dont think most WISPs are at that
stage where it matters that much. When it does matter that much, I'd argue the
WISP should have both hardware redundancy and router redundancy.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: Josh Luthman
To: WISPA General List
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Full BGP on RouterOS
Powercode's MAXX does that...or so they say. I believe ImageStream says they
can do this too.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Travis Johnson <t...@ida.net> wrote:
Having two routers talking to each other is not the same as a single router
with redundant parts. I can pull the CPU card from my Cisco and the box never
misses a single packet because the 2nd CPU card is in the same box. Same with
the route processor cards. Same with the power supplies.
If you have two boxes doing VRRP, and BGP, if the power supply goes out of
a box, how long before the 2nd box could fully take over? 30 seconds? 60
seconds? :(
Travis
Microserv
On 11/3/2010 6:26 PM, Scott Reed wrote:
OK, elaborate on how 2 distinct identical boxes is not hardware
redundancy. I think by the definition of redundancy, it is 100%. Webster:
characterized by similarity or repetition <a group of particularly redundant
brick buildings
On 11/3/2010 6:45 PM, Blake Covarrubias wrote:
Jeff,
VXRs and down. Not GSR's and up. I wasn't entirely clear in my last message.
Like Travis I was also commenting about the Cisco GSR / 12000 platform. I'm
well aware of the performance of a Linux box compared to a VXR. We run a few
VXR routers in our network in addition to GSR's, BSD routers, and MikroTik.
What you're describing really isn't true hardware redundancy. I'm also well
aware of BGP and its use in a multi-homed environment. We have two separate
GSRs acting as our edge routers. One in California, one in Arizona. Both
routers have multiple eBGP peers, and run iBGP between them. They're connected
by a series of licensed microwave radios with about 155mbps of bandwidth
between the two. We'll be supplementing that link with a dedicated GigE fiber
link in the coming months.
I'm not sure what you're getting at regarding bridging between two connections.
There's no requirement to run a bridged network in order to operate iBGP.
I have no doubt Quagga works well in some BGP applications. We don't use it
because we have requirements for performance & uptime which a Linux/BSD box
cannot currently meet. We provide voice (TDM) and data services for companies
in various industries such as mining, manufacturing, aerospace, defense,
energy, cellular, and even other ISPs. We literally cannot afford to wrestle
with the issues others on this list experience. If its not reliable we replace
it. We don't have a problem paying for reliability.
--
Blake Covarrubias
On Nov 3, 2010, at 1:16 PM, Jeff Broadwick - Lists wrote:
Hi Blake,
I’m not sure what sort of speeds you think Linux limits out at, but I believe
you might be surprised at how much throughput you can get. We generally blow
the doors off of the VXRs and down.
There are two different ways of getting hardware redundancy. One is with a
massively expensive single box, like the Cisco. The other is to set up
redundant hardware…which is particularly good in a BGP application. You can
have a relatively inexpensive router on each circuit, set up iBGP and VRRP
between the boxes, and BGP between the peers. That way, if you lose anything,
all the in and outbound traffic fails to the other unit(s). This also allows
for geographic separation of the routers. If you can bridge between the
routers, you can have them in completely different locations…thus keeping your
network running if something really nasty happens.
I can’t speak for the other companies, but ImageStream has been handling BGP
for around 10 years. We use Quagga currently and we’ve found it to be very
stable, as our customers on-list have attested. It’s one of our top
applications.
Regards,
Jeff
ImageStream
800-813-5123 x106
From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf
Of Blake Covarrubias
Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 11:31 AM
To: WISPA General List
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Full BGP on RouterOS
Hardware redundancy, wire speed packet forwarding, support for more Interface
types, and more widely tested & stable software.
I'll use a MikroTik, Linux, or BSD box as an aggregation router any day;
terminate some VLANs, act as an MPLS CE, perform QoS marking, and participate
in an OSPF area. Probably nothing more. The level of hardware redundancy &
wire-speed forwarding isn't there for my needs.
If you're just knocking IOS, I realize it isn't the wave of the future. Cisco
does too & has developed IOS XR.
Linux, MikroTik, and I'm sure Vyatta & ImageStream are great platforms. They
compete well with Cisco in some areas...others not so much. Use what's
appropriate.
--
Blake Covarrubias
On Nov 3, 2010, at 8:04, "Jeff Broadwick - Lists" <jeffl...@att.net> wrote:
I’m curious Travis…not looking for an argument.
What specifically do you think is superior in IOS (Unix-based originally) to a
hardened, purpose-built Linux distro (us, Mikrotik, Vyatta, whatever)?
Regards,
Jeff
ImageStream
800-813-5123 x106
From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf
Of Travis Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 11:37 PM
To: WISPA General List
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Full BGP on RouterOS
Tom,
I agree that Linux works very well as a router, but it still doesn't
compare to a dedicated hardware platform (like Cisco) that was built
from the ground up to do nothing but routing. We purchased a used Cisco
12008 router about 1.5 years ago off ebay. They are very, very cheap...
the only downside is they are BIG and require 240VAC. But it's way cool
to pull the CPU card while the router is moving 500Mbps of traffic and
have it not even miss a single ping (due to the redundant CPU card).
Same goes for the route fabric card. ;)
We use Mikrotik for our inside "core" router and this big Cisco for our
border router to our BGP upstreams. I have slept very well for the last
1.5 years knowing everything in the box is fully redundant (CPU, route,
power, etc.). :)
Travis
Microserv
On 11/2/2010 9:04 PM, Tom DeReggi wrote:
Note: Quagga has been very reliable for quite some time now. Imagestream and
Vyatta both use Quagga. Both are great choices for BGP routers.
I personally use Mandrake (Mandriva) Linux with a slew of custom
modifications that we have made, loaded on SuperMicro, and then use latest
Quagga.
That has worked well for us, the last 5 years. (although, I dont recommend
that to someone, until they are vastly familiar with their distro of Linux.
Last thing you want to do is use your BGP router for a Guinee Pig Science
project, rebooting it all the time to test script changes.) But once you are
comfortable with your Distro, it works well.
There are a million arguements "for" and "against" Cisco versus Linux, to be
used for the ISPs' average NOC/POP router/switch. I dont dispute any of the
arguements. But one area where I believe Linux stands tall, is as a CORE BGP
router. A core BGP router can be one of the more simplistic configured
routers because it only really needs to perform one function, BGP routing to
its connected peers. For BGP there are two critical needs.... Fast
processors and Lots of RAM. In todays world there is no excuse to not have
both of those. The problem with Cisco is that it lacks both, unless you pay
big bucks. Linux on the other hand has an abundance of both, when combined
with PC-Like hardware.
I laugh at my competitors, when they say, "oh no, BGP reset, had to reload
BGP tables, now there is latency for like 3 minutes or compromised routing
for that period" or "got a route problem, the small prefixes aren't in my
tables". . On Linux, if you want to restart BGP, well thats like 1 second to
reload tables. And no need to drop any routes, unless you want to. You could
have Full routes with like 30 peers from a single router, if you wanted to.
You can load up Linux with like 32 NICs (qty8 4port GIG NICs) in a 2U case,
if you want to, and dont even need a Switch. (Although new will cost you
about $430 per 4port PCI-E Gig NIC).
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL& Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kristian Hoffmann"<kh...@fire2wire.com>
To: "WISPA General List"<wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Full BGP on RouterOS
On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 18:52 -0500, Scott Lambert wrote:
I still need to try a Vyatta system.
I loathe the idea of managing a *nix distro on a router (which is why we
use RouterOS now). Apparently I've had too much Tik-aid, because I had
completely forgotten about Vyatta and similar options.
I have a SuperMicro 5015A-H (Atom 330 dual-core) coming in tomorrow.
I'm going to try RouterOS and Vyatta and see how BGP responds on each
with a single feed. If anyone else has an x86-based distro they'd like
to see performance on, let me know.
And thanks for all the responses. The information has been very
helpful. Unfortunately, the conclusion I came to is "I have no idea
what I'm going to do." Cisco = $$$ and MikroTik = coin flip. Hopefully
Vyatta lands somewhere in the middle.
Thanks,
-Kristian
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GAB Midwest
1-800-363-1544 x2241
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Cell: 260-273-7239
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