Brett Frankenberger wrote:
On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:13:24AM -0500, Steven Bellovin wrote:
I know nothing of how to do this on a Catalyst; for PCs, my own guess is that you're looking far too high-end. If the issue is relaying to the outside, I suspect that a small, dedicated Soekris or the like will do all you need -- there's no point in switching traffic faster than your DSL lines can run. I'm not doing load-balancing, but all traffic from my house to the outside world (I have a cable modem) goes through a Soekris 4801, and I can download large files from my office at 12-13M bps. Further, since the Soekris is bridging some networks, its interfaces are in promiscuous mode, so the box is seeing every packet on my home LAN.
Really? If it's connected to a switch, I'd expect it to only see broadcast/multicast/unknown destination MACs, as well as traffic actually flowing through the Soekris.
I believe he's refering to the situation where the soekris is doing the bridging, since the soekris only has 4 ethernet ports and two pci slots max it's likely that if you need greater than quantity 3 plus wireless internal interfaces that you'll need a switch. given the performance limits of even a 5501 I tend to disagree that the switching traffic internally in software bridge at less than line rate at 100Mb/s is a great trade-off vs say using a cheapo gig-e switch.
-- Brett