Wan PCI Card T1 Routing in Linux ( post #1)

Is it better to use linux or say a cisco/nortel or some other router for T1's?? I have been looking at Cyclades (www.cyclades.com) PC 300 cards and Sangoma (www.sangoma.com) S514 cards and some from SBE (www.sbei.com). I would like to know if Linux and one of these cards is better then a cisco 2620XM. Should I load the firewall right on this computer or would it only do routing?? Can I also load the proxy on that computer. What I am looking at is I will have a computer with an AMD 64 with 2GB of ram and 2 WD360GD hard drives as Mirrored boot Drives and 2 WD740GD Mirrored Data Drives. Then I would Have Routerboard 44 4 port Ethernet card (www.routerboard.com) and then a Sangoma S5147 Dual port T1 Card. (Or there equivalents depending on recommendations). also what distrobution of linux would you recommend for this?

Dan

I'd say it depends on your application and environment. Obviously using Cisco is going to be more industry standard than a custom built Linux box. Also, I'd guess the Cisco will have a higher 'up' time due to no moving part (harddrive). And, the router will probably suck less power, make less noise, and take less room

That said, I'm all for Linux. We have a Linux box w/ a T1 card that interfaces with our phone pbx for custom IVR stuff -- it works great. Any dist would probably contain all the necessary software to do the routing and firewalling. And, the software updates are sure cheaper than Cisco. Just make sure you find a T1 card that includes Linux drivers -- they probably won't be included in the distro.

Even w/ the proxy server, that is probably overkill on the computer specs though... T1s don't move THAT much data I had a Pentium pro 200 w/ 4 PCI 3com cards running bridge software and firewall via ipchains for 2 different 100mb networks and it never saturated the CPU...

If it was me and I had the resources, I'd probably seperate the router functionality from the proxy funcationality (dedicate that high power server for the proxy server, use a lower power machine for the router).

Jon