Claudio Jeker wrote:
quoted text
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 01:14:53PM +0200, Marco Fretz wrote:
>> Johan Beisser wrote:
>>> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 2:59 PM, phoenixcomm <phoenixcomm@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hi Gang,
>>>> well heres my 3 cents,
>>>> first why use a stupid PC (any os) for routing...... REALY BAD jue,jue 
>>>> brake
>>>> down and buy a old Cisco 7200,  7500, 3600 they are all very good 
>>>> routers, I
>>>> used a 7500 for a while and now use a 3640
>>>> i use pf as a transparent bridge behind my router.. and protects my 
>>>> servers
>>>> I have 3 nics, (world, dmz, ssh)
>>> How odd. I know at least one site that runs all of their BGP off of
>>> OpenBGP on OpenBSD boxes that are dedicated as routers. In all cases,
>>> these systems outperform the equivalent Cisco hardware for a fraction
>>> of the cost.
>> Forget this. Cisco does CEF (cisco express forwarding) that's stream 
>> forwarding in hardware. You don't have a chance to reach this PPS with a pc 
>> / server based router (any os). And I don't think there is any equivalent 
>> hardware for Cisco and other router vendors. Because only routing decision 
>> is done in CPU / memory, packet forwarding is done on the "hardware 
>> layer"... so you can't compare Cisco CPU / memory against PC cpu / memory 
>> that's not fair :-)
>>
> 
> On the 3600, 7200, 2800, 1800 and everything else that is not a L3
> switching router that costs over 100k everything is done in SW. Cisco CEF
> is nothing more then a fast path through the box that skips everything
> that is time consuming. It is still a software feature and everything
> runs over the CPU.
> Systems like the 7600 platform are able to do forwarding on the switch
> modules but unless you get the fucking expensive ones you have not enough
> cam space for a full feed. But it is not honest to compare a Cisco 7600
> or other high end super expensive near line speed routers with a openbsd
> box that is surely inexpensive compared to those behemoths.

Ok, ok. What I said was what Cisco says :D And of course I meant the 
fucking expensive Routers.

Don't get me wrong. I'm also using OpenBSD as router / firewall on 
server hardware and embedded on Soekris / WRAP. The performance is 
great. I just don't want to use PCs / BSD Boxes as area border routers, 
core routers, etc... Cisco hardware is much more reliable than PCs and 
the configuration is quite easy and structured. Configuring OpenBSD as a 
router is easy and structured as well, unlike Linux which is actually 
not structured :-)

If you have the money buy Cisco Routers (or from similar vendors), if 
you have time and want to save some money use OpenBSD.

bests
  Marco

quoted text
> 
>> But software routers e.g. OpenBSD are cheap and work well. If you don't 
>> need more than about 800Mbit/s throughput and you want to save some money 
>> us software routers... but agree, with a good server hardware, intel nics, 
>> dual core cpu, etc. you can get good performance out off a server based 
>> router / firewall.