On 7/21/05, Bill Chmura <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We finally got some money to build a router for the center of a 200-300 > user network. Upon arrival I found it to be one giant segment with old > old switches (sort of - not real ones) and terrible sprawl. > > I need to build a router that will handle 7 segments, 4 of which are > very heavily used, 3 of which are pretty light.
Can you define "very heavily used" ? Have you considered aggregating the lightly-used segments in a slightly more modern switch (e.g. a 3524XL), configuring a trunk port from the switch to uplink multiple VLANs to a single GigE physical interface on the BSD router? Alternately, if you really do need router throughput at or above 1000Mbps, you might want to consider a purpose-built gigabit router from Cisco :) Both suggestions are under the assumption that the "router" is not primarily intended as a security separation between subnets. > I was contemplating a > Quad gigabit card and a 100MB Quad card (to keep the price down). I've > got a budget of $3000 US to build this thing. I was thinking the Intel > Pro 1000 Quad cards, but thats pretty pricy considering I have to > aquire the hardware also. We are very happy with the ""Intel PRO/1000MT" quad copper GigE cards, but we are not coming close to pushing their limits, I'm still waiting for OC-3. > Can someone recommend another good obsd friendly good performer / value > for the price Quad Ethernet 1000 card? If I can keep it down, I would > use two and not do the 100MB on the slow segments. > > Also is going PCI-X going to get me much? I was reading some notes in > the archives (obsd?) that showed the cards won't need it that much, and > another post saying it was going to be slammed by a Quad card. If you expect to push hundreds of megabits at peak through the multiport card, then PCI-X will buy you some headroom. One caveat, many PCI-X motherboards can only run one card at the full 133Mhz speed. Kevin Kadow
