At work, I recently had to discard a $9,000 Cisco router because it had reached End Of Life. I agree with the organization that EOL network hardware is a security risk because it's no longer being updated. But I'm upset that such an expensive and well functioning device must be simply taken from me because of its age.

How do you all feel about infrastructure routers and switches being treated as consumable supplies? $9k and it's gone in 6 years. $1500 a year for the privilege of routing or switching. Then you're hit with another huge $9k bill to repurchase the same thing you already had (with a few new features).

Maybe there's network hardware leasing. I wonder if it would cost the same amount. At least it wouldn't be a $9k hit all at once.

Stupid relentless march of "progress".

If its 6 years old then its nowhere near the performance of current routers. You don't really want to have any router that has gone out of support because of the various bugs and security holes in IOS.

There is: http://www.google.com/search?q=cisco+leasing

The last place I worked had moved to leasing all their networking components, much to the chagrin of the network admins. But that was mostly because they (the admins) all resided in the main office in Cleveland, and would now have to go out to the 9 satellite offices every 3-5 years to replace this equipment.

But are you buying the hardware, or the support? Hopefully the latter, as the hardware doesn't do anything a cheap Dell rackmount Linux box with sshd, two network cards and some firewall rules can't do for about $8000 less. So really you're paying $1333 a year for the privilege of Cisco's support operation for your routing and switching. That Cisco can afford to, effectively, supply their Certificates of Cisco Supportedness printed on chip-filled metal boxes as opposed to on plain paper, just goes to show how much of that $1333 must be profit margin.

Peter

Presumably, you could purchase "equivalent" performance for much less money now than you spent all those years ago.

For years, it seemed that a decent desktop workstation's price was holding constant while you were just getting more performance per dollar. Now, that's all blown apart. It seems every time I go to buy a new computer, I'm paying less than I paid before, and that's without even taking inflation into account.

When I bought my first iBook I did so because it was the best laptop for under £1,000. The laptop in question ended up costing approx. £850 even with a discount. Nowadays there are some seriously capable and well specced laptops for under £500.

My new Dell laptop was a third of the price I paid for the same level of Dell laptop four years ago.

I don't know what model Cisco equipment he's dealing with, but I don't think that your statement's strictly true.

First, I am unaware of NICs for PCs that support WAN interfaces like T1/E1, PRI, DS3, Sonet, etc. If they do exist, I can't imagine that the Linux support is all that great.

Second, his Cisco might have been a combination switch and router. I'd like to see you get 144 ethernet ports in a Linux box.

Third, there are a lot of features available on dedicated networking equipment that don't work as easily or well on non-dedicated equipment. 802.1Q VLAN tagging comes to mind, but I'm sure that there are a variety of others.

If you just want to connect two ethernet networks together, then, yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to pay gobs of money for a dedicated router, but many people have more needs than a Linux box with a couple of NICs in it can deal with.

At work we used a T1 card from Imagestream in a P3 500 linux boxfor about 2 1/2 years. We even ran a TFC server on it for almost 2 years. The card was replaced because we needed multiple paths into our network (BGP4) and a lot more bandwidth.

If your telco's LTU doesn't terminate in Ethernet, the first avenue of investigation has to be getting a better telco. Failing that (or if running your own dark fibre or whatever), then yes, you do need a T1 or X.21 or whatever to Ethernet bridge, possibly even from Cisco, but that constitutes evidence of collusion between your telco and the "enterprise" networking vendors, not of any technical need. The first company I worked at that had an Internet connection, found that we had to spend £1500 on a Cisco "router" because the British Telecom LTU didn't terminate in RS232 or Ethernet or anything sane like that which we could just run into the Linux firewall, but in X.21. And that for a just 64kbps leased-line!


144-port switches aren't cheap. But considering that the router-to-WAN connection won't be faster than Gbit Ethernet, the switch-to-router connection needn't be any faster than that either. In other words, there's no particular reason to build the switch into the router. (Which would also mean that the box with the switch itself in wouldn't be Internet-facing, and so you might be less worried about firmware updates being EOL'd.)

Peter

Linux WAN interfaces (2.6.25):

• LanMedia family: most/all SSI/V.35, T1/E1, HSSI, T3 boards.
• Generic HDLC: raw HDLC, Cisco HDLC, Frame Relay, sync-PPP, X.25.
• Frame Relay: full protocol support.
• Granch SBNI12 Leased-Line adapters: ISA SBNI12-xx cards.
• ISDN support: pretty much anything works.

Those are the ones that are "in tree" in the released 2.6.25 kernel. But there are more "vendor drivers" available for stuff not "in tree".

Lots of the Big Boys of telephony are now basing most/all products on Linux platforms, so drivers should continue to become available in the future.

Cheers

That may be the case in the UK. It is most definitely not the case in the US.

ADSL..... err, hmm, lemme see... nope.

I'd love an ADSL card with an in-tree driver. AFAIK there aren't any. I've got an ADSL accessrunner from Hussein but it uses a blob

If my experience is anything to go by, anything that isn't presented as Ethernet (copper or optical) is considered legacy by BT and NTL these days.

Obviously there are times when only dark fiber will do, I prefer it for transporting video between sites. I've yet to find something that will do 8 uncompressed D1 resolution video feeds with no delay that uses Ethernet.

Err, yes actually. I only listed the WAN/router style interfaces, not all 3000 or so device drivers in the kernel!

So, yes, Linux has full ATM support, which means it also works fine with many popular USB ADSL routers, including: Speedtouch, Conexant AccessRunner, ADI 930 & Eagle, and others which share the same chipsets as those listed.

EDIT: Note that some of these (eg. AccessRunner) require downloadable firmware -- rightly not part of the Linux kernel -- and this all works fine with the in-tree kernel drivers.

Cheers

The best solution for stuff like this, is to acquire hardware that has an ethernet interface on the downstream side (rather than only a USB interface).

Nice, open IP/PPP protocols there, and no drivers required for any kind of downstream equipment. Plus the option of having the device act as a small LAN gateway DHCP/DNS server, independent of any specific machine. That's not how I use mine, but many people do use them like that.

Cheers