[Gllug] Buying a switch (a sort of repost/recap on an old thread)

[James Hawtin]

On Mon, Feb 08, 2010 at 01:22:42PM +0000, sean wrote:
> James Hawtin wrote:
> >
> >
> > Personally I use an Atom computer with an ION chipset as a router on a stick
> > using a trunked interface to the vlans on a switch, you can get ION boards
> > with a 16 way PCIE so you could add a 1/2/4 port ethernet card if you wanted
> > more physical interfaces. This gives me more than enough bandwidth.
> >
> > James
> >   
> more details on this please.
> 
> what else do you have the computer doing?
> 
> regards
> 
> sean

Ok no sure what details people want however I am more than willing to
provide what even information people would like (about the system setup).

First thing to say the system takes about 40W flat out which is less power
than my cisco switch ;-)

The board I have is a POV ION 330 which is a dual core atom computer, using
the ION chipset.

http://www.pointofview-online.com/default2.php?content_id=2&news_mode=detail&news_id=56

Being the nvidia ion chipset it has a single gigabit interface on it however
it also has a 16 way PCIE slot. Personally I use the slot for a sangoma card
but no reason why someone could not put a nic in it. My setup has mirrored
drives, and 4GB of memory.

I have centos running on it, with vmware on it on which I run a firewall
VM. So that it can talk to my local network and to my cable modem I have
them trunked via vlans into the vm.

The ion setup has enough power to be a reasonable surfing machine for me as
well as running a firewall VM. One day it might even be my phone answering
machine/VOIP machine if I ever finish setting it up... Which is something of
a busmans holiday!

Setting up a interface on a trunk is easy.... BTW is is inside my VM where i
have setup the same nic twice to make my firewall setup easier. Currently
the firewall is Centos however I ghinking I should change it to PF/openbsd.

# Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper)
VLAN=yes
DEVICE=eth0.128:1
BOOTPROTO=none
IPADDR=172.22.128.9
NETWORK=172.22.128.0
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=no

# Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (Copper)
VLAN=yes
DEVICE=eth1.20
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
IPADDR=192.168.100.2
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
ONBOOT=no
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=no

Don't forget a Gigabit interface is full duplex, so a gigabit of input can
be matched with a gigabit output, most peoples use is async in terms of
bandwidth so having only on nic isn't really a problem. Current drivers in
linux also supports jumbo packets, so you don't have any pesky problems with
MTU and it needing to be reduced by 4 bytes to fit the vlan tagging.

James
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