Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 11:21:52 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Cc: francis@usls.edu Subject: Re: Cyclades Z series vs. Cisco 2600 Message-ID: <200008021621.LAA70715@aurora.sol.net> In-Reply-To: <200008021522.KAA10959@earth.execpc.com> from "jgreco@execpc.com" at "Aug 2, 2000 10:22:38 am"
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> How does the Cyclades Z series system on a FreeBSD machine compare to > a Cisco 2600 router in terms of async/dialup performance? I'm also > interested to know why you chose Cyclades over Cisco and vice versa. I just got one of these in, but I've not had time to play with it. Basically a Cisco 2600 is a dinky little router with very few overall resources. It has a nice 1U form factor that makes it attractive for tight locations, and of course it's got fewer moving parts than a PC. I'm guessing that you can get 16-port serial modules for it, although I don't know... but if the modules can do 230,400 I'd be impressed, and I'm fairly sure that the unit would be saturated trying to handle a few dozen busy ports. Now, again, not actually having played with the Z just yet, here we have a card with rack-mountable 16-port breakout boxes. One PCI card can handle up to four 16-port modules. The unit is built with 16c654 (yes, 16650's) and a built-in MIPS(?) processor of some sort, which means that not only do you have the advantage of larger rx/tx buffers than most serial devices, you also get real hardware ASIC flow control rather than the CPU-intervention model used by the 16550. And you get the benefit of enhanced 960.8kbps serial ports instead of the 115.2 or maybe 230.4 most other things provide. Lower interrupt loads, etc. All of that is offloaded onto the MIPS processor, anyways...! In theory you can throw several of these cards into a PC. With 5-PCI-slot machines being quite common, think of putting 4 loaded Z's into a machine with a dual 10/100 Ethernet, to get a 256-port terminal server with impressive throughput. Now, again, all of this is hypothetical, since I've not actually tried the card yet. However, I _can_ speak well for your average PC as a terminal server. It isn't the cheapest possible solution, but it _is_ completely programmable, and more importantly, the cheapest CPU and motherboard you can buy new today is many times faster than that Cisco 2600. It means that you can do things like packet filtering without worrying as much about melting the CPU, you can do ssh, write custom stuff, and if you're using it as a serial console server, you get the ability to log to hard disk. :-) One downside to the Cyclades is that the RJ45 pinout seems to have been chosen by a dartboard and an engineer with a bad throw. It makes no sense to me. Cisco at least did something useful, even if it was the exact opposite of an existing standard (sigh). -- ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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