Hi guys,

I am exploring backup measures (and documenting it, urgh) in the event the router (CISCO 3845) supporting my web servers fail and I need to put in place a substitude, should it fail outside its "warranty period".

My router does BGP routing via 2 uplinks, 1 is a full transit line (10Mb) the other is a local peering line (1Gb).

I'm thinking of finding ways to build a linux box to do routing in place of the CISCO box in times of adversity, but so far my searches turn out Zebra, which according to their page was last updated 2003. Then there's Simple Linux Router, which is already defunct.

So what you guys recommend and how should i go about it? ALso, is it even possible to do a load-balancing scenario? using heartbeat?

thanks!

OpenBGPD

It's a production-quality BGP4 (EGP/IGP) & OSPF router, very easy to configure, and very secure. Some of the largest carriers in the world are currently using it on the live Internet for testing 32bit ASNs. The other alternative is Quagga, which is based on Zebra, but I have heard that there are quite a few problems with Quagga and it's not really production-quality right now (just what I heard--I don't do BGP myself so I don't have first-hand knowledge).

hi chort,

thanks! does it mean i need to install openbsd for this to work? will it work on redhat or fedora?

Currently, yes. The same team did make a portable version of OpenNTPD, but I don't expect there will be a portable version of OpenBGPD any time soon because it uses some of the architecture from PF and CARP which currently only work on *BSD OSs.

Nope.

There is al so ipcop and the more ad advanced iptables method. I recommend the eai;ire of the two.

IPCop does not do BGP, and iptables is only a netfilter, it doesn't do routing protocols.

Quagga works great for OSPF BGP RIP and regular routing.. Works up to 700 packets per second on Dual Xeon 3.6GHz Dell Poweredge 2650 supplies High speed wireless connections, bandwidth limiting, Qos and mac filtering. For just a basic router it will handle much more. There are even production routers that use Quaga or Gated, that are Linux based and work just as good as Cisco and half the price ImageStream routers. If you are going to build a Linux version use Quagga along with Deamontools to ensure that the processes are not killed and restarted automatically. I have seen it run on Suse, Slackware, Gentoo, and Debian distros. They are quite reliable but all in all, computers don't make reliable routers due to the fact that there is too much hardware that can go wrong vs, ImageStream or Cisco that are maid for routing and has less hardware components to fail.. Once Quagga is installed you can use vtysh and configure it just as it was a Cisco router.. Quagga uses Zebra, ospfd, bgpd, and Ripd, We are an ISP with over 4000 dialup customers and about 500 wireless customers, and most of our equipment is Linux with two gateways to the Internet load balancing BGP with two different providers. I recommend Slackware because it is tried and true and one of the most stable systems, Gentoo also works good. The main components is a stable kernel and lots of memory.