On Aug 1, 2006, at 3:13 PM, Tim Pushor wrote:
Jason Dixon wrote:
On Aug 1, 2006, at 2:48 PM, Tim Pushor wrote:
Can anyone recommend another 4 port 10/100 ethernet card that
will work well with OpenBSD 3.9?
I don't have any recommendations on 4 port cards. If you have a
switch that will support it, you should consider using VLANs with
a gigabit card instead.
Hmm now that is VERY interesting. Would it be possible to run a
trunk on a vlan, then a carp on the trunk?
Also, why the gigabit? Strictly performance?
I think you're getting your technologies confused. If you're
referring to an OpenBSD trunk (versus a Cisco trunk), that is an
aggregation of physical ports on a switch. Theoretically, you would
do this, then layer vlan interfaces on top of the trunk. However,
you mentioned that you wanted 4 10/100 interfaces. Using a single
gigabit port would enable you to exceed the capacity of 4 10/100
interfaces with a single port. You would have a single physical
interface (say, em0) connected to a switch port enabled for VLANs
(e.g., Cisco trunk). Then you can split up the networks by VLAN,
rather than by physical connection. Here's a sample setup.
# cat /etc/hostname.em0
up
# cat /etc/hostname.vlan0
inet 10.10.0.1 255.255.255.0 10.10.0.255 vlan 100 vlandev em0
# cat /etc/hostname.vlan1
inet 10.20.0.1 255.255.255.0 10.10.0.255 vlan 200 vlandev em0
# cat /etc/hostname.vlan2
inet 10.30.0.1 255.255.255.0 10.10.0.255 vlan 300 vlandev em0
# cat /etc/hostname.vlan3
inet 10.40.0.1 255.255.255.0 10.10.0.255 vlan 400 vlandev em0
The benefits should be obvious. One of my more complex setups has 3
vlan interfaces on em0 (one per T1) and 16 vlan interfaces on em1
(one per isolated network). I am using carp interfaces on top of
each vlan interface, providing failover capabilities. Not to mention
the QoS. :)
But to answer your question... no, it is not strictly a performance
(higher throughput, fewer interrupts, etc) boost. Having less
hardware means less opportunity for something to fail (ports, cables,
etc).
HTH.
--
Jason Dixon
DixonGroup Consulting
http://www.dixongroup.net
