From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Dec 21 0:19:56 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from ind.alcatel.com (postal.xylan.com [208.8.0.248]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1410D14D9D for ; Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:19:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from wes@softweyr.com) Received: from mailhub.xylan.com (mailhub [198.206.181.70]) by ind.alcatel.com (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.1 (ind.alcatel.com 3.0 [OUT])) with SMTP id AAA00834; Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:18:36 -0800 (PST) X-Origination-Site: Received: from omni.xylan.com by mailhub.xylan.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4 (mailhub 2.1 [HUB])) id AAA00719; Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:18:35 -0800 Received: from softweyr.com ([204.68.178.39]) by omni.xylan.com (4.1/SMI-4.1 (xylan engr [SPOOL])) id AA17989; Mon, 20 Dec 99 23:43:15 PST Message-Id: <385F2FFD.CA594829@softweyr.com> Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:45:01 -0700 From: Wes Peters Organization: Softweyr LLC X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en Mime-Version: 1.0 To: Garance A Drosihn Cc: Matthew Dillon , freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cool little 100BaseTX switch - they're coming down in price References: <199912190410.UAA01049@apollo.backplane.com> <385C789C.DD290597@softweyr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Garance A Drosihn wrote: > > At 11:18 PM -0700 12/18/99, Wes Peters wrote: > >Matthew Dillon wrote: > > > Prices have fallen a lot in the last year. I'm happy to be able to > > > get rid of my HUBs, I was constantly having to deal with packet loss > > > when running saturation tests and never able to figure out what > > > was causing it. > > > >Switches are a better solution, no doubt about it. They are well worth > >the cost, even if you're just trying to pep up an old 10Base-T network. > >Investing in 10Base-T switches at this time is a false economy; for only > >a few dollars more per port you can get 10/100 switches like yours and > >upgrade machines to Fast Ethernet as budget allows. > > Getting back to the topic of switches, I've recently bought three > different "reasonably cheap" 10/100 switches for some testing. > One thing I would have liked to have had was an option to "mirror" > the traffic of one port on some other port. > [...] but I was wondering how > much one has to fork out before you get extra options like a > port-mirroring capability... Lots more, in terms of dollars. For this, you need at least a managed switch, and probably a smart switch. I know for a fact this one, a 24-port 10Base-T switch with 2 10/100 uplink ports, supports port mirroring and hundreds of other features -- about $1100: http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/1,10231,0-11726-311-1459828-3,00.html?tag=st.sh.11726-311-1459828.sort.price For 24 100Base-TX ports, you step up to about $2100: http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/1,10231,0-11726-311-794908-3,00.html?tag=st.sh.11726-311-794908.sort.price For more info about both, see: http://www.ind.alcatel.com/enterprise/products/omnistack/ost04.html Note that these are "Layer 3" switches with VLAN support, IP and IPX routing, etc. The per-port prices aren't that different than the simpler managed switches, but the port count tends to be high. Caveat: I work on these things daily. Consider whatever I say about them to be evangelism. Also note that turning on software-dependent features like port mirroring can do terrible things to your throughput if not used judiciously. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message