OpenBSD Journal

Preliminary T1 device driver added for Sangoma AFT cards.

Contributed by grey on from the community support comes full circle dept.

Thanks to MotleyFool for writing in: Support for the Sangoma Network Device driver has been added to -current CVS entry is there a PC based router in your future?

This looks like the results of the plan originally raised here on misc@. And you may recall that this sparked some further discussion on undeadly, from this posting. That discussion brought about these comments from kris which looks like may have contributed to this whole process. Great to see culmination of these combined efforts.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (151.37.27.43) on

    This is good, but it should be better to focus on low-mid market that today use ADSL/HDSL lines. Sangoma has some cards for these job.

    Comments

    1. By j (80.28.71.28) on

      Looks like their S518 ADSL Card is supported. Anyone has one and can report, I see nothingin man(1).

      Comments

      1. By Brad (216.138.200.42) brad at comstyle dot com on

        No, the ADSL card is NOT supported by this driver. This only supports the newer generation of T1/E1 cards.

      2. By cAPTAIN^k (203.97.68.33) on 

        The support is from the manufacturer as opposed to the OpenBSD team and the drivers being carried in the OS.The drivers they mention probably come on a floppy or CD when you purchase the hardware, just like you would get for any other OS.

  2. By Johan M:son Lindman (213.114.133.74) on

    This is good news, there's one problem though. How can the sysadmin convince the suits that a P3 with a coupe of these T1 cards, BGPD and OpenBSD is better then a (fifteen times more expensive or so) Cisco 720x? OBSD with BGPD and these drivers are probably as capable or even more capable then your average 720x and it's certainly more scalable in terms of HW, god knows how many times I've been cursing over the 7204s that only has one ram-slot. Yet those kinds of arguments won't convince a suit that has gotten a free lunch and some fancy brochure from a Cisco sales rep.

    Comments

    1. By Sam (82.152.88.21) on

      Put it in a big purple box?

      Comments

      1. By Johan M:son Lindman (213.114.133.74) on

        SUN gear is as expensive as Cisco, mind you. :P

        Comments

        1. By mirabile (2001:6f8:94d:1:2c0:9fff:fe1a:6a01) on

          What about the purple-pink Genua boxen then? They've shown Soekris and some bigger gear at LinuxTag, and donated some coffee to us ;-)

    2. By Anonymous Coward (80.65.225.73) on

      We need fancy brochures too ! ;)

      More seriously, I hope the pragmatic 'get-on-the-facts' documentation for those new features won't lag too much behind the amazing development work, since most of us won't be able to integrate manpages infos in a usable thing (need to "bootstrap" my mind on such complex tools!).
      In this way pf or psync+carp could be seen as very good example (with excellents tutos) while IPsec is the not so good part : it's sometime hard for noobs like me to figure exactly how components interacts by only reading dispersed (but very good by themself) manpages (ipsec(4), vpn(8), ipcomp(4), isakmpd.conf(5), isampd.policy(5), ipsecadm(8), isakmpd(8), keynote(4), etc.).Eg: how do we use ipcomp w/ isakmp ? how manual ipsecadm cmds can cohabit with isakmpd ? etc.

      I think suits are -like newbies- better convinced by simple and concrete examples ....

    3. By Anonymous Coward (66.93.216.162) on

      Actually if you think about spending $1500 on a cisco 2610 v spending $500 on a box + the time to build the box. Overall hardware and man hours will be less for the cisco. I hate to say this but as we redo various parts of our network the financial higher ups want total numbers not just cheaper hardware. Plus having no hard drive is a plus for a router/firewall.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (4.16.136.107) on

        I don't disagree with you really, but a couple of soekrises could help out there. Cheaper hardware, even when you get two for CARP.

      2. By Jason (24.210.147.8) coldiso@houx.org on www.houx.org

        2600 are pretty low end man. I mean the pps they can do is pretty small. not to mention they get crippled when doing much that is processed switched - even with cef its only double. ~2Mb. You can get a lot farther with a OpenBSD for a lot less money. To your comment on man hours this I can agree with, Cisco does do a good job of making upgrades easy - and their docs are quite well. But you can't read their code :-) so you don't know when they put backdoor passwords in that someone else can find. ala Cisco Aironet. I would put a obsd box out their with some T1's in that hang off our OC-48 Ring for if nothing more than testing if I can get the boss to buy a few. World labs are nice !

      3. By cyc (80.139.125.237) on

        and what about the costs to patch the ciscos every month? What you want is the TCO, not the cost buy and set it up.

      4. By kokamomi (217.215.84.114) on

        on the other hand, maybe some company will feel compelled to package 3.6 in a slick rackmount and sell it with support and broschures for $1000. i think something like this is in the mind of theo when he's talking about putting cisco out of business...

    4. By RC (4.61.192.56) on

      How can the sysadmin convince the suits that a P3 with a coupe of these T1 cards, BGPD and OpenBSD is better then a (fifteen times more expensive or so) Cisco 720x? The same way you convince a suit of anything else...

      There are always much higher-priced products out there that don't do any more than their lower-priced equivalents, but companies aren't hemmoraging money, so they must be figuring these things out, one way or another...

      If you explain it to a suit, and it doesn't convince him, it doesn't really adversely affect you. If they've got money to waste, let them. If they don't have the money to waste, they're much more likely to listen to you when you tell them there's a cheaper way.

      And you can always go over their heads... There's nothing higher-ups (with quotas to meet) hate more than someone who doesn't go the cheapest possible route to get something done. At least, that's been my experience. When you tell someone that lots of money is being wasted, they tend to listen, more intently than anything else you have to say.

    5. By marklar (220.244.38.124) marklar_@hotmail.com on

      To get a suit to buy it these days, it needs to be reliable. IDE disks aren't going to cut it, you need to boot from flash, config using a serial console or web browser (on a dedicated management interface or internal ethernet interface), and put it in a pretty rackmount box. Swappable flash cards would be nice (think quick upgrade/downgrade/box swap) and seperate OS and config cards would be even better.

    6. By Lars Hansson (203.65.245.7) on

      Write a convincing business case with price/performance/technical/whatever comparisons and whatnot. Yes, it's boring as hell and you'll hate it but sometimes you gotta bite the bullet.

  3. By Bacon (64.81.40.109) on

    flashboot and nsh are steps in the right direction, but the solution needs to be integrated into the OpenBSD official sources and maintained by the OpenBSD team. The single file config is admittedly less important than having an official flash image and ability to upgrade the image remotely.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (4.16.136.107) on

      Even cisco is moving away from the single image.

      Comments

      1. By Bacon (64.81.40.12) on

        If the OpenBSD team wants to come up with a more complex and flexible binary run from RAM based OS than a single image, more power to them. But with the inherent flexibility of compiling your own image for your own purposes, it wouldn't be necessary. It would certainly be nice to have a more flexible system that you could download, pre-compiled, that you could piece together to work on Soekris and other boxes, as well as update remotely.

  4. By Jason (24.210.147.8) coldiso@houx.org on www.houx.org

    I have not had any problem getting BGP put in place in our network(ISP). I have also even suggested it to akamai in a recent thread with their BGP guys (they use zebra). If Henning could write us a [ISIS OSPF]d I would pull out a lot of Cisco's that I have that ride fiber(ethernet) to each other. I readily await a good DS3/OC3 card to continue putting OpenBSD in the network I maintain. We have been playing a lot with the flash models and with the cost being so different - Its not so hard to convince the suits when they can buy several and just put one in carp standby :-) And to the guy who wants to put it in a purple box - you are quite funny.

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