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Re: Couple questions




On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Meir Litmanovich wrote:

> > well, it may not be as fast, or flexible, or have open-source drivers, or
> > save you an IP address, or....
> > 
> Ira, Linux is great, but ...
> Cisco definetely faster router that linux. It's dedicated for it and

did you TIME it? did you actually try? the dedicated microcontroller in it
(I'm in doubt it's more powerful than a 386), is dedicated to routing
alright, but who said a pentium with a PCI card can't do a better job?

> does it's job pretty well. It quite flexible, can do NAT for you
> and few other good things. 

Linux does NAT, and proxy dhcpd, and socks, and packet filtering, and port
filtering, and has special kernel modules to do NAT for FTP, realmedia
(realnetworks) and a few other things.

> Generally there is two aproaches for doing things.
> One is using special peace of hardware for each
> purpose - dedicated router in hardware, dedicated
> firewall, dedicated NFS server and so on.

if you have more than a T1, maybe, but I see no reason to seperate, say,
the firewall from the router. it will actually let you assemble packets at
a higher MTU if your line allows you to.


> Second is using one or many general-purpose servers
> (like Linux or SUN) for many things .

after the security, the main considereation is just bandwidth and server
CPU load.

> 
> There's no absolutely truth (IMHO) in this case -
> allmost any place uses both. Which is better for 
> you - decide for yourself 

also true.

-- 
Ira Abramov          (°-               L I N U X              -°)
whois: IA58          //\                                      /\\
www.scso.com         v_/_ Because a 486 is too good to waste _\_v