[tech] Switchesu

Ian McKellar yakk at yakk.net.au
Thu Sep 14 01:20:06 WST 2000


On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 05:06:22PM +0800, Grahame Bowland wrote:
> 
> 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.

SMB?

I think a router box should do:
	routing
	firewalling
	NIS slave (firewalled on the external port)
	DHCP server
	tftp/mop booter thing
	NAT[*]

> 
> 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 :)

I would avoid the BSDs. Their kernel network stuff seems cooler than a lot
of the linux 2.2 stuff, but there seems to be a few interesting userland
packages to do statefuly firewalls and stuff for linux. In my experience
the documentation for the BSDs sucks badly - we've had trouble getting the
existing FreeBSD based box to do lots of the very basic stuff we have
wanted it to do.
> 
> 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.

*shrug*

We're probably better off doing that bit by bit - I don't think we'll get
a bulk discount for 4 of them.

Ian

[*] NAT: I think it would be cute if outgoing connections to WAIX IPs were
masqueraded as coming from the corresponding WAIX IP# - that way I wouldn't
need to keep hacking SSH.




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