Let me start out by saying that I work for a company that makes Linux based routers. <plug> Checkout www.imagestream.com </plug> Anyway, any Linux box will perform just fine at the data rates your talking about. You don't even have to worry about what type of hardware your using as long as it not more than 5 years old. Now to answer some of the points that other people have brought up. You can make a pc that has a large number of interfaces. I have seen Linux boxes with 100 t-1's and 2 ds-3's plugged into them... 8 port t-1 cards are common and dual port ds-3 cards are easy to get. You just have to get mainboards that have enough pci slots. In general as long as you stay inside of what the hardware can do you should be able to route at line rate. Currently most pc hardware is limited to about a max of 1Gbit/sec but server hardware can be used to build routers that will route 4Gbit/sec. Not as good as some of the highest end cisco routers... but ten's of thousands of dollars cheaper. One thing I have seen doing testing of many routers vs Linux routers most cisco routers tend to get badly boughed down when running many access lists. This is not a big problem with a Linux box or even other non-cisco routers. If you don't believe me checkout... http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2003/0714rev.html You should have no problems doing what you want to do. josh p.s. alot of the packet per sec numbers that cisco talks about are only valid when routing from Ethernet to Ethernet interfaces and with packets that stay in the fast switching path on the cisco. If you start talking about other interfaces all of those numbers are out of the window. This leads many people to end-up with cisco's that are way under powered for the application. I am not saying that cisco's can't route at wire-speed but that most people don't have the right router for the job. _______________________________________________ LARTC mailing list / LARTC@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://mailman.ds9a.nl/mailman/listinfo/lartc HOWTO: http://lartc.org/
