[Gllug] [OT]switch question.

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 2003-04-08 at 17:59, Peter Adamson wrote:
> My new company (have job now ;))
> is about to upgrade its servers.
> I've just been spending over a day installing RH linux on them all.....
> 
> I have a little question about switches.
> 
> We have 16 computers in groups of 4.
> One option is to have all 4 computers in a group each have a connection 
> to a switch,

I'm not sure what you mean by 'a group'.
If you are talking about clustering - either a compute cluster or a high
availability cluster, then what I say below doesn't count.

If you mean computers racked in set of 4, then my advice is to
buy a 24 port 10/100 Mbps switch, probably with a gigabit uplink or at
least a gigabit slot for the future.
Get a managed switch so you can have fun telnetting to it, and can use
SNMP management and traps.
Brands that come to mind are Extreme, Nbase, HP... or any one of lots of
others.
Switches are so cheap these days that you really shouldn't think too
hard about the costs.

And if there is a good reason for separating them into groups of 4,
you could use VLANs.

If the computers live in separate racks, you can have 100 metres of Cat5
to the switch. Just keep the wiring neat.
Even better look to the future and put a switch in each rack,
and uplink them together.





-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug