Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 13:35:48 -0600 From: "Roberts, Patrick S" <RoberPS@LOUISVILLE.STORTEK.COM> To: "'Richard Archer'" <rha@interdomain.net.au>, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: RE: Support for passive backplane chassis? Message-ID: <199807311935.NAA24184@stortek.stortek.com>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Cisco Cat-5000 will work great in that capacity.... have used the a great deal and have found them to be exxellent in the areas of scalabilty.... as for your security problem, with a good switch, that has hardware routing capabilities, there is not much worries..... - -- Patrick S. Roberts StorageTek - Systems Engineer OpenSystemsSupport - -----Original Message----- From: Richard Archer [SMTP:rha@interdomain.net.au] Sent: Friday, July 31, 1998 2:00 AM To: freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Support for passive backplane chassis? At 15:51 +1000 31/7/1998, C. Stephen Gunn wrote: >In message <l03130318b1e6eae3d5e0@[203.17.167.127]>, Richard Archer writes: > >>I am thinking of using a passive backplane system with 16 PCI slots. >>This would allow each router to handle up to 64 ethernet segments. >>But I can't find much information about how these interact with FreeBSD. > > This would scare the heck out of me. I use a FreeBSD box at my >day job to route between 5 Ethernet Interfaces. While it's a fast >box, and it all works fine, I don't want to think about the bandwidth >aggregation problems you might have with 64 ethernet cards on one >machine. At that level you're not looking for a CPU to make decisions >on the packets. You want a Switch. Hi Steve, Well, that's certainly a heads-up! The problem with the switches I've seen are that they don't offer the security of a router. I really want a solution that operates as a firewall between the LANs. From what I've seen, products like the Bay Networks Accelar 1200 finish up costing over $1000 per port (that's the price in local currency here in Australia). I've costed out a solution using FreeBSD boxes (either 4 16-slot backplane boxes or 16 4-slot motherboard solutions) and either way it works out to about $500 per port. But of course $500 per port works out being very expensive if the solution does not work! > I would check out Lucent's Cajun Switch, or some of the nicer Cisco >10/100 switches that can take a route processor. The Lucent one claims >to be 10/100 on lots of ports (140 or so) and provide Layer-3 switching >(basically routing) in hardware, at wire speed. While you're looking >at $25K or so, racks of BSD machines aren't free either. $25K (double that in Australia) would actually work out being a comparable price to the FreeBSD-based system. I'll certainly follow that up. Also the Cisco Catalyst 5000 series with the 48-port 10baseT ports might work out being a reasonable price. > Don't get me wrong here, FreeBSD is great, but PCI isn't going to >handle what you want. At least not at high saturation levels for >each subnet. Just wondering, how does this building hook to the rest >of the universe? At the moment the building is still a shell :) I was going to use a Cisco 3260 with a 2E2W card with each WAN port connecting to a different upstream. (Actually one upstream and one to a local peering point.) Thank you for the advice! ...Richard. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 5.5.5 for non-commercial use <http://www.nai.com>; Comment: Internet Security Consultant iQA/AwUBNcIcvro11bxpeVfFEQI4KwCg1Ig8Ffkia7Krz+XMdRxZs3YjM94AnRa8 d5+KE/zP5j9bVA7nodyPa42L =Wd1e -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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