Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 23:17:51 -0500 (CDT) From: "Matthew N. Dodd" <winter@jurai.net> To: Gavin Cameron <gavin@ormond.unimelb.edu.au> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 'making' a router using a PC and FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.93.960519224633.14139J-100000@sasami> In-Reply-To: <199605191327.XAA08063@gateway.ormond.unimelb.edu.au>
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On Sun, 19 May 1996, Gavin Cameron wrote: > I'm going to need a router with 7 interfaces, which will all fit in a > standard PC. The interfaces will all be 10Mbit, a mixture of UTP and > fibre. It would be nice if the same machine could support 100Mbit in the > future. I've got a FreeBSD 2.1-Stable box with 8 ethernet interfaces (and 10 serial ports, but thats for serial device management.) thats doing that right now. (core1.intersurf.com) > I was thinking about the following PC configuration to solve my problem: > Pentium (what speed will I need?) > 32MB ram (open to suggestions here) > 4 PCI ethernet cards > 3 ISA ethernet cards > ISA Video card > 1 gig disk I'm using an Asus P55TP4N with a P120 and 32 megs of ram, a 2 gig Quantum Saturn, and 2 ZNYX 314 quad ethernet cards. Its been in production for about a week, and we just renumbered all of our production machines yesterday night so it has only been under real load for about 24 hours right now. I'm only using 5 ethernet ports right now, but plan on using more in the coming month. > I know you can get multiple ethernet ports on some cards these days, do > people recommeend these? if so which ones? I'll be sticking to 2.1.0 on > this machine as I will need high reliability. Once 2.2 is released I'll > be running that on this machine. The ZNYX 314s are nice cards. They are a bit longer than I would like and I can only fit two of them on a TP4N due to the CPU+Fan. I think the 312 would work well too (2 port) or the SMC Etherpower^2s. > I'll have one 10Mbit feed to the net, will a PC be able to sustain 10MBit > throughput? Well, I don't expect to be able to have all 8 ports going full bore routing across that box, and I messed around using ping (-f -s 1500) and I was able to induce packet loss across it. At this point, our bottlekneck is the Internet connection and if that changes, I'm probably going to be getting an etherswitch and a bigger cisco. I'm really just splitting traffic up, and could have used a bridge instead of a router, but I'll be able to use ipfw and filter some traffic with this solution. > I'll be doing IP firewalling and accounting on this machine, as well as > running a DHCP server, apart from that it'll be shuffling packets. I'm running our primary DNS on this box (if this box is down, then resolving names isn't going to do anyone any good.) and will probably have a Postgres95 database to do traffic statistic collection. > I look forward to your thoughts. It seems to work well, but I'm a little nervous about my box. If it goes down then the whole internal network is well and truely fucked. It will be interesting to see if it will cope with heavy traffic. *evil grin* Have a good one. | Matthew N. Dodd | winter@jurai.net | http://www.jurai.net/~winter | | Technical Manager | mdodd@intersurf.net | http://www.intersurf.net | | InterSurf Online | "Welcome to the net Sir, would you like a handbasket?"|
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