[tech] Switchesu

[Grahame Bowland]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 04:43:36PM +0800, David Manchester wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 03:40:31PM +0800, James Andrewartha wrote:
> > > On Wed, 13 Sep 2000, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> > > 
> > > Err, I said this last night, but without a 100Mb card on the router, this
> > > is pointless. One of the plan 9 boxen is a pentium and is already mounted
> > > in a rackmount case ... would fryers miss it much if we made it the
> > > router?
> > 
> > We have a Pentium-based router with two 100Mb cards half constructed. It's 
> > all good. Someone seems to have pinched one of the two cards though - I 
> > suspect [TDH] took it for testing compatibility with normal Tulips.
> 
> Guilty.
> 
> > The reason I sent email about this is that it's a good thing to do as well 
> > as upgrading the router. We talked about upgrading the router last night.
> 
> What is the system that we have earmarked for the router?
> 
> Would it be worth buying a cheap 5 PCI slotmotherboard and a Celeron for
> the task?

Well, there's a P100 we could use - but I think the motherboard only has 
3 PCI slots (from memory.) A decent router would let us do a lot more - 
and having it on non-smelly hardware is a plus. I agree - we should buy 
something like a slow Celeron and make it the router. I suppose it could 
do more than just routing - or does it takes lots of CPU to do cool 
stuff?

We should definitely do RARP and better firewalling - that'd stop 
anybody just plugging their machine in and doing stupid stuff on the 
network. The router as a NIS slave sounds sensible. We could also do SMB.

I suggest using FreeBSD or NetBSD. Linux 2.2 doesn't do as much cool 
networking stuff as the stable BSD releases and Linux 2.4-test7 gave me an 
OOPS in "fs.c" after about a day of use :)

If we can get switches at $200 we may as well get four. That'd free up the 
big hub in the machine room for use in events whenever we network the loft. 
We'd also have a faster network.

The rack discussion - I think the machine room does take far too much space.
Late last year and this year we grew an awful lot of graphical terminals - 
and almost all of them work reliably. We don't have enough bench space to 
set all of them up. We'd free up an awful lot of space by getting lockable 
racks and this is definitely worth looking at.

I can't see a downside - sure wheel would loose it's hidey-hole, but the 
machines would be just as secure. In it's present state there are important 
cables trailing across the machine room just asking to be tripped over. Perhaps 
with racks and no machine room things would be tidier - just lined up against 
the back wall.

Grahame

-- 
Grahame Bowland - http://gbowland.ucc.asn.au/