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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.kei.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!newsxfer2.itd.umich.edu!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD router, as good as a harware router ? Date: 7 Jan 1996 23:04:53 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 38 Message-ID: <4cpjil$k1l@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <4cof7j$59@news.mistral.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu In article <4cof7j$59@news.mistral.co.uk>, Pete <plaker@cybar.co.uk> wrote: >I've been convinced that FreeBSD would be a good OS for my pentium >mail/web/news/ftp LAN server, but can FreeBSD on a seperate >386 really be as reliable and more monitorable and configurable than >the 'black box' option ? If so, this is much much cheeper, why >doesn't EVERYBODY do this instead of spending a fortune on a hardware >router ? Becuase the answer is, like many things, "it depends." For some situations, the "black box" router is a clear winner. They can be easily rack-mounted, they are quieter on average (just a tiny fan) and require less maintainance. If I was going to site a machine on a shop floor with heavy machinery vibrating all over the place, or anywhere near the fryer in a restaurant, you can bet I'd use a box over a PC. The PC would be dead inside a week. There's also throughput to consider. If I was routing 3-4 (10Mb) LANs with a lot of inter-lan traffic to deal with, I'd probably get the router also. A box that does nothing else but route packets is going to blow the doors off an all-in-software solution that's capable of doing everything from routing packets to running vi. 200-300K/sec is what you'll typically get in lan-to-lan routing with a FreeBSD box, whereas 700-800K/sec is more likely with a nice Cisco router. In other situations, the PC will do the job just fine. Maybe you don't need to site it in a hostile environment, and maybe 200K/sec is just fine for your routing needs (remember: This is only *between* network traffic). Maybe you also want your "router" to do a lot of extra things that a standard Cisco box just WON'T do, like collect your mail or enable your users to read USENET News. In some situations, a Cisco is also a lot easier to set up and administer than a full UNIX box (though not always!). Whichever solution you chose, make sure you have somebody pretty technical around to do the maintainance! :-) Jordan