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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Linux router (don't laugh) WAS:Re: test
At 08:51 AM 10/28/98 -0600, Phil Howard wrote: >> > Attached is an mrtg graph from someone decided to throw about 8MB of >> > garbage our way for a few hours. This little linux router just sat there >> > and idled through it. >> > >> And you point? [PC's as routers is as old as the hills, loads of >> ISP's do it]. > >Anyone know where to get some multi-port (not hub/switch, but true distinct >ports) NIC cards that are in the price range of N times the cost of a normal >NIC card, compatible with Linux? I have a project that needs 12 to 20 ports. >I've stuffed 4 NIC cards into a Linux box and it handles that OK. But I'd >like to get more in there at proportional cost (I can hack the kernel if it >needs any table size increases ... viva la source). > >For one thing I'd like to isolate all our colocation boxes into their own >individual subnets. You have two problems with this and they're both PC hardware-based. 1) IRQs are limited, if you subvert the printer and COM IRQs and have a single SCSI card for your disk (and the required SVGA display controller), you can use IRQ 3,4,5,7,11,12,14,15. This will max you out at 8 NICs on a linux box. Each NIC must have its own IRQ. 2) It makes no sense to have 100baseTX on anything less than a PCI slot, very few motherboards have more than four or five of these. In addition they only have four or five ISA slots, but one of them is physically shared with the PCI slots. You can put 10baseT on the ISA slots, but I wouldn't recommend 100baseTX there (3com 3c515 does 100baseTX on an ISA bus but throughput is slow, even for a single NIC). So, if you are only doing 10baseT, you can have a mix of ISA/PCI NICs for a maximum total of eight NICs before you start running into serious hardware limitations. For 100baseTX you have a maximum of four NICs. Total cost should be under $900US, if you are running Linux, plus the time it takes to configure this mess (about three daze [call it a week]). ___________________________________________________ Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993) e-mail: <mailto:[email protected]>[email protected] Internet phone: hawk.mhsc.com Personal web pages: <http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer>www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/ ___________________________________________ I bet the human brain is a kludge. -- Marvin Minsky
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