[lug] Router Recommendation

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:08:57PM -0600, George Sexton wrote:
>I'm putting two servers in a colocation facility, and the facility prefers
>that I provide my own router, and they would provide a sub-net. Since it's a

A Linux box makes a great router in that sort of situation, but only as
long as you aren't under a DoS.  It just can't handle the number of packets
per second and still remain responsive to allow you to do things like shut
down the offending server.  That sort of thing.  Of course, the other
option would be to go into a colocation facility that will provide the
routing for you...  Some places will, some places won't.

This is also one of the benefits of going with a managed hosting place over
going with co-location.  For example, we charge $150/month per server which
includes the router, machine, power, monitoring, and even some optional
sys-admin services.  That's extremely price-competitive with co-location
from what I've seen, especially since we do all the hardware maintenance
and have cold-spare hardware on-hand in case of a failure as well.  Of
course, this is all coming from a company that provides managed hosting, so
read into it what you will.

>Does anyone have a suggestion  for a budget rackmount router, that
>preferably includes a switch with 4-8 ports?

Well, there are some interesting-looking routing switches that would
probably do the job you're asking starting around $3,000.  1U, some have
redundant power supplies, multiple gigabit ports, ability to do RIP and
OSPF routing as well as just static routes if you aren't doing anything
that's very concerned with availability.  Of course, you then have to be
concerned with what happens if it dies, you probably want to have a second
one on-hand for a failure, but if you've got that you might as well set it
up with high availability routing so that it will just route around the
broken box.  Of course, then you also need monitoring of both of them to
make sure that if one goes down you aren't running on just the other one,
waiting for it to fail.  Same idea as monitoring a RAID array.

If $3,000 doesn't hit you as "budget", a Linux box is probably your best
route.  With on-board dual-port and an out-board 1 port card you can handle
the upstream and links to the two machines.

Sean
-- 
 We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
                 -- Oscar Wilde
Sean Reifschneider, Member of Technical Staff <jafo at tummy.com>
tummy.com, ltd. - Linux Consulting since 1995: Ask me about High Availability