nanog mailing list archives
Re: Core router bakeoff?
From: johnl () iecc com (John R. Levine)
Date: 8 May 1998 01:39:40 -0000
PCs are also designed with a mindset that saving $.10 on a component saves millions, encouraging overly cheap designs. Considering the typical PC customer has no problem with rebooting their machine several times a day, that gives them plenty of room to cut corners without pissing off their primary client base. This is not to say that you can't build solid hardware, but the typical PC vendors simply do not have a level of quality sufficient for 24x7 operation.
I doubt that anyone was suggesting building your backbone out of closeout specials from CompUSA. If you're reasonably careful in choosing and assembling your PC hardware, particularly in your choise of power supply and cooling, and run one of the mature BSDs on them, it's not hard to get 24x7 reliability. I have a bunch of BSDI boxes here doing everything from routing to DNS to web CGIs to X animations (often all on the same PC) and the number of crashes is down below one per year. If I rack mounted them and put them in a climate controlled environment rather than my spare bedroom, they'd do even better. As someone else noted, for what they cost you can get two of everything for hot sparing. There are vendors that specialize in BSD PCs who can put together systems like this for you. Even on cheapo PC hardware, the vast majority of the crashes using system software from suburban Seattle are due to software bugs, not hardware problems. My former main server which was rock solid under BSDI crashes daily with Windows 98. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl () iecc com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Current thread:
- Re: Core router bakeoff?, (continued)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? John A. Tamplin (May 07)
- Message not available
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Jay R. Ashworth (May 07)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Perry E. Metzger (May 07)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Karl Denninger (May 07)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Perry E. Metzger (May 07)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Karl Denninger (May 08)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Selina Priestley (May 08)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Kevin Steves (May 09)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Andrew Bangs (May 09)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Michael Shields (May 09)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? John R. Levine (May 08)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Eric Germann (May 07)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Neil Villacorta (May 07)
- Message not available
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Richard Welty (May 08)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Richard Welty (May 08)
- Re: Core router bakeoff? Blake Willis (May 08)
- Uptime... dirk (May 08)
- Re: Uptime... Ron Fitzherbert (May 08)
- Re: Uptime... Jon Lewis (May 10)