[AusNOG] l2tpns

[Stuart Low]

Hi There,

Short answer, Yes, definitely. I no longer work for the company in question but L2TPNS is used extensively for a large mobile related termination platform. We pushed it all the way to it’s limits of 65,000 users although lowered back to 50,000 concurrent sessions per cluster on account that the throttling capability involves packet reforwarding to the Master node and the cost of hardware was minimal relative to the total user count (at last count >150,000 users). I should also point out that the bandwidth budget per user was for 3G so your results may vary depending on your use case.

We successfully achieved ~10Gbit per cluster using 6-8 Dell Poweredge 860s. Initially we used the onboard GigE (Tigon3 cards) initially but as I was leaving I believe these were bumped up to 10Gbit cards as I left. We paired this with Radius based authentication and L2TP multi-hop for “branded” 3G terminations to various clusters. In the largest setup we used the telco’s ISN configuration to balance across multiple clusters although presumably you could use a round-robin Radiator deployment to achieve the same thing. Probably the main thing to look out for is jumbo frames combined with some websites PMTU discovery configurations (Facebook was a serious culprit here) causing either heavy fragmentation on your upstream routers or non accessible websites.

Finally, we wrote a number of plugins which have been contributed back in my Git commit from 2010:
http://sourceforge.net/p/l2tpns/git/ci/3ce8267eb86eb63decf101aeaa1d54285d5ca762/

I can’t say it’s actively maintained anymore (and there is some tweaking required on modern platforms like CentOS6) but it is rock solid, stable and proudly Australian made :).

Good luck!

Stuart


On 10 Aug 2014, at 4:38 pm, Nick Edwards <nick.z.edwards at gmail.com> wrote:

> Curious, does anyone here (optus?) still use this on linux on general
> server hardware (dl360/380 or dells equiv etc)?
> 
> Looking for results on performance, like realistic limits to $num
> sessions, with throughput on  $hardware?
> 
> off-list anonymous responses accepted :->
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