Good FreeBSD Supported Gigabit Ethernet Card?

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Sep 14, 2007, at 9:56 AM, David Kelly wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 14, 2007 at 08:55:33AM -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
>> 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.

On the internal LAN there are four.  There is the big one in the  
closet where all of the ether ends up.  There are two in my office  
(and really one is effectively just being used as a repeater for  
convenience of where cables run) and there and there is one in my  
wife's office (her desktop, laptop and network printer).

I may put another switch in the room with the TV and Wii, but at the  
moment the TV isn't connected to anything and the Wii is on wireless  
(I'll have to run a cable to that room if I want to do more in there).

>> 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.

That does seem safer.  But I also like the idea of having a log in  
anywhere give you the same experience.

>
>> 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.

Thanks.

-j


-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/