# Wi-Fi News > Ειδήσεις - Αναδημοσίευση άρθρων >  Vyatta open source router

## elkos

πηγή: http://software.newsforge.com/article.p ... 92&tid=132

The one-year-old company Vyatta is attempting to grow a community around the Open Flexible Router (OFR) it has compiled with several already available pieces of software -- and perhaps bring something new to the router market.

Vyatta launched its online community last month, and posted an early beta version of the software on its Web site. The intention is to create software that users can install on off-the-shelf commodity hardware and tweak to their specific needs, the company says.

"There has been open source routing code out there for a long time," says Dave Roberts, Vyatta's vice president of strategy and marketing, "so that in and of itself is not new. What we've done is package it together so people don't have to do it themselves. And we've wrapped an interface around it so it's easier to use."

The company plans to build a business around the OFR by selling services and support to enterprises that adopt and deploy the server software.

Vyatta's OFR is a heavily modified version of Debian built around the eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP). Vyatta created the OFR, billed as a complete open source router and firewall distribution, by integrating parts of more than 60 open source projects, as well as its own code. According to the licensing page of the OFR wiki, the code included with the software is licensed under either Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)-style licenses or the GNU General Public License (GPL).

XORP, which is the main component of the OFR, is an open source router platform that supports several protocols, including Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Routing Information Protocol (RIP), Protocol-Independent Multicast Sparse Mode (PIM-SM), Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD), Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

The XORP project is based at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Released under a BSD-style license, the software was created for use as a network research tool. The National Science Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, and Vyatta fund the project.

Open source, extensions expand router possibilities

Though the ICSI developed XORP originally for network research, both the platform's developers and Vyatta see the open source router product as offering enterprises more customization potential. They also expect to see the potential of routers widen as the largely closed area of hardware and software gains accessibility.

XORP project lead Atanu Ghosh says that router-specific applications are on the horizon. He believes the open platform will spur the creation of new software of this type, benefiting both researchers and the commercial router market because of the potential for third-party development of applications. In most cases, only vendors can offer router applications right now.

Ghosh says that proprietary systems are too large for customers to tinker with anyway. "Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS) is a single, monolithic program," he says. "It would be impossible for a third party to add a feature, even if [Cisco] allowed it. In XORP, each protocol is a separate process, making it easier to bring in a third-party process."

Ghosh expects developers to come up with ideas the ICSI has not. He says some simple applications may pop up for intrusion detection and worm suppression, which many routers already run. With XORP, vendors don't have to create those applications, meaning developers could create patches and fixes and release them faster.

Roberts says that Vyatta sees opportunities for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, among others, and the company is "leaving the door open to sell add-ons." However, Vyatta may eventually make any additional products developed for the router software free and open source, as it does with the OFR. 

Roberts says Vyatta plans to base its business model on that of Red Hat, by nurturing a community of developers around its software while selling services and support. What Vyatta will sell specifically is still being finalized though, he says.

Roberts also pointed to JBoss and MySQL as examples of open source companies that subsist on selling support and services to users of their products. He says that posts to the OFR mailing lists and specific interest from at least one company prove there is a market for the type of company Vyatta wants to be.

"There's a class of customer that loves open source and wants a company that will stand behind software," Roberts says. "We are an open source company, not a company that uses open source. We definitely are trying to grow the community, and we see it as a place where people can innovate. Our job is to help those people."

Mark Stallcop, a network architect at E*Trade Financial Corp., says that the ability to run third-party applications and customize routers is valuable because of the time proprietary vendors can take to bring new ideas to market. Though companies may meet regularly with hardware vendors to discuss what they need, he says years often pass between discussing an idea and seeing actual results of the conversation.

"Most organizations are first going to be attracted to price in the same way that Linux Web servers are attractive based on their price," Stallcop says. "I think [an attraction to] features and capability will come later. But you have a networking base out there that is basically trained on the major corporations' platforms and used to living within the limits of those systems. So, you have a cultural shift that has to occur."

Stallcop says he agrees with Roberts' assertion that Vyatta's OFR could fit best for mid-size data centers and branch offices, based on his own performance tests of the software. The results of Stallcop's tests are available at the OFR wiki. If E*Trade opts to deploy routers that run the OFR, Stallcop says it won't be for at least a year, because the product is still largely being developed.

A burgeoning open source market

Vyatta is the first company to announce a product built around XORP, Ghosh says, but he has spoken with several other companies that are interested in using the platform in products of their own as well. He says the project chose the BSD license so that companies and open source projects could adopt the platform for their own products.

"I think [XORP and Vyatta] will open up innovation," Ghosh says. "It's very hard now if you have an idea that routing or something else could be done in a better way. This is going to make it much easier."

A beta version of the OFR and a live CD are available for download now. Roberts says, however, that the software is "not necessarily ready for mission-critical jobs" because it contains bugs and can crash. Vyatta is inviting users to test the software and file bugs as the company works toward releasing version 1.0 sometime this summer. 




> Been there, done that
> 
> Vyatta is not the first company to offer an open source router option. The Linux-based router vendor ImageStream Internet Solutions has been selling hardware that runs open source, extendable software since 1995 and has about 30,000 units deployed across a variety of industries, says Doug Hass, chief operations officer for the company.
> 
> ImageStream routers run the ImageStream Linux software distribution, which includes a specific Linux hardware driver that Hass says allows customers to use off-the-shelf hardware more easily with the company's products. Though the software stack is made up of both open source and proprietary software, the company also licenses its closed source code to hardware manufacturers who want to embed the software on their own products.
> 
> Hass says that recent press coverage that predicts an open source router solution will topple large vendors such as Cisco is wrong, because "another billion-dollar Godzilla" isn't going to appear to take them down. He thinks there's room in the market for several companies similar in size to ImageStream, but he doesn't see an open source company that doesn't sell an actual product as one of them.
> 
> "[ImageStream] survives because we sell hardware," Hass says. "We've been hearing that an open source routing product was going to take over the world for 10 years, and it has yet to happen.... When are writers and industry pundits going to stop doing backflips every time a new company comes along and says, 'We're going to beat everybody and give everything away?'"

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## elkos

πηγή: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business ... /index.htm

The Black Box That Would Conquer Telecom
An open-source project tries to break Cisco's lock on the $4 billion corporate router business.

By Om Malik
February 22, 2006: 3:45 PM EST

(Business 2.0) - At the San Francisco offices of Panorama Capital, two dozen engineers, venture capitalists, and academics gathered around a nondescript piece of hardware they all helped build. Then Allan Leinwand, CEO of a stealthy Panorama-funded startup called Vyatta, powered up the device, the world's first open-source router. As one of the programmers downloaded Red Hat Linux to his laptop by way of the black box, the room erupted in handshakes and high fives.
Disruptive technology

A few months after the unveiling on that October day, Vyatta's router is about to go into beta release, and it will likely hit the market this summer. The machine runs on two Intel chips, but far more noteworthy is its software, known as XORP, or extensible open router platform. The versatile open-source application can direct data traffic for a giant corporation as easily as it can manage a home Wi-Fi network.
And that's what makes it as disruptive as a leaf blower in a feather factory: Vyatta's router will cost about a fifth the price of comparable models from big networking equipment makers such as Cisco Systems. "Open-source is providing real competition to the commercial telecom companies," says John Todd, an open-source telephony expert. "It will force them to improve."

Even as open-source software has ravaged the bottom lines of Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, Cisco and Juniper Networks continue to enjoy fat margins selling expensive gear running proprietary software. But as corporate IT managers switch to open-source for operating systems (Linux), Web servers (Apache), and databases (MySQL), many are realizing that they spend an even bigger portion of their budgets on networking equipment: routers and switches to direct traffic, firewall devices to ensure security, and PBXs to run office phone systems.

In fact, Vyatta is one of several companies attacking the heretofore closed--and highly profitable--world of networking with open-source alternatives. "Open-source is already in wide use, and over time it will start to have a broad impact [in telecom]," says Nortel Networks acting CTO and chief architect Peter Carbone.
Circumventing Cisco

But no project is as audacious as Vyatta's play for the corporate router market. The idea began at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, where researcher Atanu Ghosh was studying the future of broadband. Ghosh knew that to make changes to router software, he had to submit them to Cisco or some other behemoth--a laborious process.

So he and his colleagues decided to write their own software, building in support for cutting-edge technologies such as video-on-demand and VOIP. The project caught the attention of Leinwand, a startup veteran who was also one of Cisco's early employees. "This is the most obvious opportunity in telecom," he says.

With Ghosh and his fellow researchers as advisers, Leinwand last April founded Vyatta--named after the Sanskrit word for "open." The company plans to focus on routers for midsize U.S. businesses and the regional offices of global corporations. That segment is worth $4 billion and is heavily dominated by Cisco.

For now, telecom leaders don't seem threatened by the trend. "Open-source is not an issue in the networking market because networking is based on open standards," says Cisco spokesman Ron Piovesan. Adds Juniper spokeswoman Karin Taylor, "We can support any open-source solution that is based on industry standards."

But if Vyatta's black box can do all it promises at a fifth the price of the competition, the company stands to win a lot of converts. In fact, it could be an all-out rout.

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## MAuVE

Αν κάποιος έχει χρόνο και όρεξη για πειραματισμούς, ας ρίξει μία ματιά στο 

http://cobia.stillsecure.com

Για routing software χρησιμοποιεί το XORP που είναι το ίδιο με αυτό του vyatta (γι' αυτό και δεν άνοιξα νέο thread).

Από μία πρώτη ματιά, το user interface μου φάνηκε πιο φιλικό από αυτό του vyatta.

Κυκλοφορεί και vm appliance

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/952

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