[Scottish] Free Router!

[Andrew Back]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Graeme Mathieson wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 10:02:49AM +0100, Ian Drake, IT, CIR, SE Dunbartonshire wrote:
> >
> > Apart from the fact it's one of the most powerful/useful routers that money
> > can buy, it's also one of the cheapest - it's FREE (both beer & speech,
> > which is good, because free beer normally increases speech) Tell all your
> > friends about it.
>
> Though the hardware to do the line protocol conversion usually isn't
> free.  And chucking good enough quality hardware at it to route stuff as
> fast as humanly possible (trying to do routing linespeed between 8
> 100MBit network interfaces, for example) isn't exactly cheap either.
>
> IOS isn't necessarily the expensive bit of a Cisco router.

More likely the High Speed Synchronous Interfaces. Price up an Eicon card
for Linux.. That said Enterprise IOS costs, should you have a need to
route DECnet, OSI etc.

> Of course, I use Linux boxen for all my routing needs anyway. :-)

I use OpenBSD. I don't entirely know why, I think I just fall all the
security stuff. It is handy though in a firewall/router, and it does
support hardware crypto accelerators out-of-the-box.

Someone mentioned Fritz! PCI ISDN, if anyone has one going spare I may be
interested. Unfortunately ISDN support in OpenBSD is poor and calls for ye
olde hardware.

Cheers,

Andrew