After getting some much needed sleep I realized the key things I left out of the last post.
Ethernet wise, currently the whole mess is at 100MB... It will be that way at least for 12 months after this. As far as heavily used, I just got on the scene myself and the usage is way down. School, summers off. But the end of the year is crazy for them network wise. So in the end, all I can say at this point is that its barely running at peak usage on 100MB. I was thinking Gigabit for the larger buffers they have, and support future expansion - In a few months, or sooner I want to bring one of the segments up to GigE from the router out to the switches in that building. Part of the segmentation is to get students and faculity onto different segments and give me more control at either the inner firewall or the outer firewall. I can however, as you suggested, aggregate a few into one subnet. I will look into that today - but the lightly used ones can be definately be done that way. The other reason for segmentation is the incredible sprawl this has... It stretches from each end of campus to the other. Space is not a factor, I can fit a 6U into the rack without much trouble. I too looked for the sk cards, but there is no Quad for them. I was hoping to reduce interrupts by using Quad cards... If I went with several sk dual cards, say 3 of them, would my interrupts be killing me? Thanks Bill On Thu, 21 Jul 2005 02:09:22 -0500 Kevin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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
