I'm in the same position as yourself and I've been in testing and production with a set of old Compaq PII-450 workstations with 192 MB RAM apiece... they run like a charm with four full tables, with plenty of RAM left over. One of them actually died on me, and I've been lazy about pulling out one of the other five identical models I have in storage to replace it.
It took 10 minutes each to load OBSD on the two and another 40 minutes putting the configuration together (that part's dependent on your OBGP, CARP, and general BGP skills) and voila... nice little routeservers. Dan Farrell Applied Innovations [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of > Richard Wilson > Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 8:47 AM > To: misc@openbsd.org > Subject: Using old thin clients as a BGP testbed > > I work for a small hosting company, and the boss says he wants to start > doing BGP for our upstream connection. This means I've got to learn BGP. > At least I've managed to persuade him to buy me an O'Reilly book :-) > However, the other thing I demanded was a test network of some kind. BGP > is one of the few things where, if I get it wrong, I could mess up other > people's stuff as well as my own. He said fine, here's a few pennies to > do it with. Not nearly enough to buy even a couple of crap machines off > ebay. > > Then, an idea occured to me. We have half a dozen old HP t5125[0] thin > clients, which have been unused since we upgraded our desktops to proper > boxes. The plan: get half a dozen 512MB USB sticks, install 4.0 on them, > boot off them, and bing! One test network. They're only 400MHz machines > with 128MB of RAM, but I think they'll do for playing with routing, BGP > et al, given what you can acieve with a Soekris. > > My questions: Am I on a hiding to nothing here? Am I missing anything > obvious? I plan to use the vlan driver to pretend to have more than one > ethernet interface, with them all plugged in to a cheapo 8 port switch. > Am I right in thinking that the dumb switch will just pass vlan tagged > packets through without poking them, or am I going to encounter issues? > > I don't mind poking at things and playing round till it works, but given > the possibility of vlans not working over dumb switches, I figured I'd > ask if I was on a hiding to nothing before I started. > > Also, if anyone has any suggestions or comments, I'm all ears :-) > > > [0] > http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-321959-89307-338927- > 89307-472257.html > -- > > Richard 'Dave' Wilson > Systems Administrator > > Senokian Solutions Ltd. > Business Innovation Centre, > Binley Business Park, Coventry, > United Kingdom > CV3 2TX > T: +44 (0)24 76 233 400 > DDI: +44 (0)24 76 233 416 > F: +44 (0)24 76 233 401
