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From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Message-Id: <199611152127.PAA29032@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Subject: Re: changed to: Frac T3?
To: dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 1996 15:27:49 -0600 (CST)
Cc: dror@dnai.com, isp@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199611152031.PAA05879@etinc.com> from "dennis" at Nov 15, 96 03:31:51 pm
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> >I'm beginning to buy this like of thinking. 
> >My original thinking was that I've seen disk fail more than anything
> >on our FreeBsd servers so that I didn't feel comfortable with the
> >idea of having a box with a disk running as a router. 
> >On the other hand the idea of one of our server having a disk failure
> >doesn't cause fear in my heart the way having our Cisco fail does. 
> >I know that we have enough parts in house to rebuild almost any
> >server from scratch in a couple of hours. We can get additional
> >parts any day of the week, almost any time of the day. On the
> >other hand if the Cisco's power supply or motherboard die we're
> >in trouble. We do have dual Ethernets and dual T1s still, it's
> >a bottleneck. 
> >
> >So, I guess we'll start considering using T1 cards and FreeBSD boxes,
> >just need to have a spare T1 card.
> >Now, if someone would only offer a T3 card we'd be really happy. 
> 
> If only someone could get Freebsd to switch 17,000pps or more....
> 
> Whats the fractional T3 market? We're comtemplating putting an
> HSSI on our new PCI card (don't even ask!) which would be able
> to do ~32Mbs. To do full T3 would require redesign, and I dont think
> FreeBSD or any other unix platform could reliably switch 86Mbs, so
> I'm not sure its worth the effort. The advantage of the 32Mbs solution is
> that there would be no driver that needs to be written...it would just be
> an interface (HSSI vs V.35) difference on our standard product. 

Hi Dennis,

I am guessing that your "32Mbs" would be a 16Mbps frac T3 line,
bidirectional?

I was reliably routing 5000pps the other day on a Pentium 100...
and it did not seem particularly stressed out.

Has anybody set up the equipment to actually _try_ this?

It would be interesting, no doubt :-)

... JG