FreeBSD based router ...

[Jerry B. Altzman]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:08 AM, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> (Putting a total of 6 quad-port NICs on a single PCI-bus would totally swamp
> that bus though, so if one were to actually use so many NICs I would rather
> recommend e.g. the Asus P5BP-E/4L motherboard. It has 3 PCI slots and 3
> PCI-E slots in addition to the four gigabit LAN ports included on the
> motherboard - so you can get a total of 28 ports if you fully populate all
> slots with quad-port NICs (not counting any USB-connected ethernet ports one
> might add.) It also has built-in graphics so one does not need to waste
> one slot on a graphics card.)

And all this just to *pass packets*; if you're making real *routing*
decisions based upon that (i.e. you're making a router rather than a
switch), which requires that packets take a trip to the CPU, you'll
find yourself coming to the realization that Cisco and Juniper might
actually be on to something, there, and that ASICs might actually be
worth what you paid for them.

YMMV, HTH, HAND.

> Erik Trulsson

//jbaltz
-- 
jerry b. altzman jbaltz at gmail.com www.jbaltz.com
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