Thread: Which border router?

noob alert: The following might be me talking rubbish so please feel to correct me

Currently we take our transit from a copper handover from our supplier which we put into our switch and all is well in the world. However I'm starting to want to get the ability to be able to have more control over the network, such as port filtering etc on the border. So as such I'm thinking that having something between the switch and uplink (e..g Cisco 3507?) would mean that we could get this functionality and also have the ability to go to BGP at a later point.

Currently traffic floats around 100-150Mbit and I would like something that could scale to say 400-500Mbit. Is this possible and am I looking at the right thing? As always budget is an issue but I know this isn't going to be £100 job.. I'm guessing £1-2k..

A switch would do it for port filtering etc, but you're not going to get something BGP capable for 100Mbps+ for £2k!

I'd look at Cisco 7200/7300, perhaps a 6503E-SUP32 (although watch out for the max route limit of 256,000 routes - a full BGP table is 205,000 already).

Otherwise I'd suggest a decent firewall (or pair) - perhaps an ASA.

If all you're wanting is basic port based filtering then a 3750 and a static routing setup to your existing bandwidth supplier will probably do the job nicely, provided you don't want too many ACL rules. If you're actually looking to multihome then this is a different problem entirely.

Failing that look at some inline firewall appliances but I doubt you'll get anything specialised for your budget.

Originally Posted by garrence

You might want to look into using a freebsd box running Quagga as a cheap way to get a reasonable BGP router.

Or Openbgpd someone has just mentioned -

http://www.openbgpd.org/

Quite, although more documentation is available on Quagga/Zebra, and the interface is probably more familiar.

OpenBGPD isn't for the faint of heart, ask a basic question on the list and you'll be shot down in flames before you can say "asbestos suit" and the documenation isn't documentation, it's just a command reference.

SUP32 - Tat's not just a BGP route limit, that's a limit for IGP and EGP routes as well as a few other bits and pieces added together, which generally means <240k EGP routes can be used.