Good FreeBSD Supported Gigabit Ethernet Card?

[David Kelly]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 08:55:33AM -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2007, at 1:25 AM, Subhro Kar wrote:
> 
> >No offence meant, but why would you like to upgrade a "home"  
> >network to Gbit? Is it required at all?
> 
> I've been slowly undertaking the same kind of upgrade and so would  
> like to know whether my reasons are sound.
> 
> As of six months ago all of the daily used desktops (three) in my  
> house are gigabit, but none of the servers are.  For the past year or  
> so any time I bought a new switch, I've bought a gigabit switch.

I'm a touch concerned about the number of switches your network might
have. Is best to bite the bullet and get single big central switch.

> Eventually I would like to have a proper NAS sharing out home  
> directories.  The desktops are all OS X.  Some members of the  
> household play with iMovie which involves some very large files.

Might be best to leave home directories on individual machines and add
network storage that each user has control over.

> I don't know when I'll get around to setting up the NAS, but many  
> decisions I make today keep that goal in mind.  Thus, I am migrating  
> to gigabit on my home network.  When I do build the NAS, I will  
> certainly be looking for a good FreeBSD supported gigabit ethernet card.

Years ago I bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC 2.8GHz for about $400 direct.
Has an on board 10/100/1000 Intel served by the FreeBSD em driver. Has
been completely without issue. Wire speed between FreeBSD and MacOS X
machines is essentially same as disk speed. The striped drives in my Mac
Pro will sustain 90 MB/sec but would not when they were installed in the
FreeBSD machine.

Have no problems playing DVDs created in iMovie/iDVD on my MacBook Pro
via wireless from the Free BSD drives. Use NFS to share from FreeBSD,
double-click to mount the .iso image on the MacBook, launch Apple's DVD
player. Eject the image when done.

> Do I really need gigabit?  Of course not.  But I don't really need  
> most of the stuff I do.

I remember when a PC ethernet card was $1000 and required $400 of
software to barely make it work under DOS. Today gigabit and plain old
"fast" ethernet are virtually the same price. Is best to go ahead and
get gigabit.

-- 
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
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Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.