On Thursday 08 July 2004 2:21 pm, Mike O wrote:
> I'd like to chime in here considering I brought this topic up a few years
> ago. From a standpoint of routing data from one subnet to another with high
> speed serial interfaces etc.. nothing beats a cisco. Cisco routers have
> special ASIC(application specific intergrated circuits) that do nothing but
> routing and other features.
That's true, however the benefits of ASICs (in this context) are throughput
and latency. If you don't have a high-speed (by which I mean more than
about 10Mbps) pipe to the Internet, then throughput is not an issue (ie: your
firewall / router is not the bottleneck in the system), and as for latency,
well how important is it to you really?
A Linux box with a Sangoma WAN card will happily connect directly into a high
speed serial port on a Telco NTU, and I've yet to see any external connection
running at less than ATM speeds (155Mbps or 625Mbps) where a Linux system
can't handle the packets.
My feeling is that unless you're an ISP in the core of the Internet, where the
important features are gigabit routing, dynamic routing protocol support, and
apart from dropping a few RFC1918 addresses, you're not trying to do any
firewalling, then you don't need to spend money on a dedicated router when a
Linux system will do all the routing you need and supply firewalling and
traffic control if you want it as well.
Regards,
Antony.
--
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