On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 01:47:28PM +0000, Richard Wilson wrote:
> I work for a small hosting company, and the boss says he wants to start
> doing BGP for our upstream connection. This means I've got to learn BGP.
> At least I've managed to persuade him to buy me an O'Reilly book :-)
> However, the other thing I demanded was a test network of some kind. BGP
> is one of the few things where, if I get it wrong, I could mess up other
> people's stuff as well as my own. He said fine, here's a few pennies to
> do it with. Not nearly enough to buy even a couple of crap machines off
> ebay.
>
> Then, an idea occured to me. We have half a dozen old HP t5125[0] thin
> clients, which have been unused since we upgraded our desktops to proper
> boxes. The plan: get half a dozen 512MB USB sticks, install 4.0 on them,
> boot off them, and bing! One test network. They're only 400MHz machines
> with 128MB of RAM, but I think they'll do for playing with routing, BGP
> et al, given what you can acieve with a Soekris.
>
> My questions: Am I on a hiding to nothing here? Am I missing anything
> obvious? I plan to use the vlan driver to pretend to have more than one
> ethernet interface, with them all plugged in to a cheapo 8 port switch.
> Am I right in thinking that the dumb switch will just pass vlan tagged
> packets through without poking them, or am I going to encounter issues?
>
> I don't mind poking at things and playing round till it works, but given
> the possibility of vlans not working over dumb switches, I figured I'd
> ask if I was on a hiding to nothing before I started.
>
> Also, if anyone has any suggestions or comments, I'm all ears :-)
No, provided that OpenBSD actually works on those machines, which is
likely but not guaranteed, what you plan sounds good. They will
certainly have plenty of power.
I'd normally recommend setting up a NFS server in such a situation, but
your network is most likely not going to be that stable... ;-)
Joachim
