Just thought I’d ask a question of endless usefullness to the entire community. What hardware do you use for your core routers? What motherboards seem to work well with mikrotik, which ethernet cards? What type of media do you run the mikrotik software on?
We use SuperMikro superservers with xeon cpu’s - typically > 3.0ghz. 512mb is plenty even with BGP. I’ve always liked using flash media for booting, typically a 512mb or 1gb brand name flash card and a CFtoIDE adapter.
Intel Pro 1000 cards are by far the best out there, IMO. The superservers come with dual pro 1000’s onboard and you can add a 4 port in the extra pci-x slot if you want.
Sam
We also use primarily Supermicros, very nice solid boxes, we have had very few problems with them. The Intel Pro 1000s are quite nice, and very fast. None of these boxes are on the “core” exactly, but most of our major pops have a few.
Mostly, we use vanila P4s rather than Xeons, since we have not seen a significant differance between the two using MT (perhaps 10% slower, probably due to the inferior cache). For the price of two Xeon boxes, we can put in three P4s, get extra redundancy, and ~30% better performance as a whole. They seem to be good upto about 200Mbps of throughput each, while doing fairly complex tasks (queuing, firewalling, PPPoE, etc…), close to 900Mbps with a simple config.
–Eric
basically every intel based Pc is ok.