[nycbug-talk] breaking up a big cisco

[Isaac Levy]

Hello N.J.,

On Apr 11, 2006, at 4:48 PM, N.J. Thomas wrote:

> Another thing I am worried about is the whether or not the 2821 router
> can handle 3 carriers. Our traffic needs are fairly low, our Tier 1
> carriers are both 5Mbit burstable, and we rarely go above 15Mbit  
> during
> peak times. We'd be adding another carrier only for redundancy, not  
> for
> the bandwidth. However, because we are an ASN running BGP, I'm not  
> sure
> if the 2821 router would be constrained by memory limitations.

Before I (or anyone else) blabs too much on the topic, I noted that  
your original email doesn't mention CARP (or Cisco's VRRP) as a tool  
for providing redundancy.

Is there any reason why you want/need to stick to Cisco gear?

--
With a decent budget, and a decent amount of rackspace (let's say  
6u), is it out of the scope of reason to run OpenBSD on new X86  
hardware, and use OpenBSD?

CARP and OpenBGPD are ostensibly designed explicitly to suit your needs.

The hardware used could be comoddoty X86 gear, and if your  
uncomfortable cramming too many nics into the boxes, you could use  
inexpensive (therefore easily replaceable) dumb switches to feed the  
servers.

You could therefore fit 2 1u switches (perhaps with 48 ports each)  
and 4 1u servers, (quad ethernet nics in each) into the same  
rackspace, for a pretty good price- and maintain extreme transparent  
redundancy, (as well as many other benefits from using OpenBSD on  
your perimeter).

--
Here's a basic document about using CARP, if it helps:

http://www.countersiege.com/doc/pfsync-carp/

Best,
.ike