Routers: From Cisco/Juniper hardware to Linux/Quagga software

Jean Francois (Jef) Bucas 
Senior Systems ...
DIAS



For years, the Dublin Institute for Advanced studies has used BGP-based routing in order to interconnect its three sites as well as provide redundancy. Three years ago, as the economic constraints were really pronounced, we started experimenting with generic computers to route the traffic, running Linux/Quagga/IpTables to replace the aging equipment, and testing how far we could push the idea.

Today, all three sites are successfully routing traffic using low-cost
equipment, with a full gigabit throughput and are even running
additional services (proxy, NTP, DNS).

This technical talk will describe what was the initial situation, what
were the motivations and will go through the steps to implement this idea. It will present the key benefits in terms of management, cost efficiency, flexibility. It will show how it made maintaining the
dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 firewall easy with an efficient in-house BASH
script; how it achieved unification of the network configuration (git)
and monitoring (xt_recent); or how it helped reducing the number of
machines on the network. It will also cover some challenges and how
these have been or will be overcome.


All talks:


If you require information about any aspect of the conference please contact: Fi Coyle: fi.coyle@heanet.ie / +353 1 6609040