From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Aug 5 10:12:51 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id KAA02603 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 5 Aug 1996 10:12:51 -0700 (PDT) Received: from scooter.quickweb.com (scooter.quickweb.com [199.212.134.8]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id KAA02574 for ; Mon, 5 Aug 1996 10:12:45 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (mark@localhost) by scooter.quickweb.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id NAA12193; Mon, 5 Aug 1996 13:19:42 -0400 Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 13:19:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark Mayo To: Doug Rabson cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 100BASE-TX hubs In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Mon, 5 Aug 1996, Doug Rabson wrote: > I was thinking of building a small 100BASE-TX network at home to try and > stress-test our NFS code and also investigate its performance. It seems > Are there any suppliers of low cost 100Mbps ethernet hubs out there > (preferably with a UK distributor)? Alternatively, can I avoid a hub Yeah!! Matrox (the same guys who make the smokin' Millenium video card) just released an entire product line under the name of "Matrox Networks". I saw the stuff at Comdex in Toronto in late june, and it seemed pretty amazing.. they were streaming 10 feeds of full-motion video. The most interesting product is a 4 port "multiport NIC" that is a PCI card with 4 100BaseTX ports. Very cool. For single server type environments it's the neatest thing I've seen in the NIC arena for quite a while. Just stick one of those in a server, and you can hang 4 clients off with no hub. And the card is only about $1000 canadian (list - probably way cheaper on the street). Matrox is also making hubs with a PCI back-plane and all, which are also very cheap -- list of about $2000 for a 12-port. The product line is called 'Shark' I think. You can find more info at www.matrox.com (or www.matrox.ca). The multiport NIC comes with drivers for NT, Netware, OS/2, but not Unixes. Matrox is usually quite nice to develpers though, so they might give some specs to someone that was interested in doing a FreeBSD driver. cya, -Mark ------------------------------------------- | Mark Mayo mark@quickweb.com | | C-Soft www.quickweb.com | ------------------------------------------- "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." - L. Peter Deutsch > > On the other hand, maybe I will just scrounge some old 10Mbps equipment > :-( > > -- > Doug Rabson, Microsoft RenderMorphics Ltd. Mail: dfr@render.com > Phone: +44 171 251 4411 > FAX: +44 171 251 0939 > >