Long Day's Journey into <Bleep>

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2011, Chad Perrin wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 06:01:03PM -0400, Daniel Staal wrote:
>>
>> Depending on your needs, Soekris, ALIX, or Netgate products could all work.
>> Most don't have large numbers of ports (2-5 built in are standard, and some
>> have expansion capability), but can run some higher-level processing while
>> doing switching work.
>
> I appreciate the information.  Unfortunately, while I can find products
> offered under these brands for sale on the Internet, this is not (as I
> mentioned) within my areas of expertise, so I'm finding the information
> about the products somewhat opaque.  In many cases, it's not even obvious
> which of the products I find are suitable for building various types of
> network switches.  Do you know of any Webpages that might help me rectify
> my dearth of understanding in this area?

>
> Thanks to the completeness of documentation such as the FreeBSD Handbook,
> learning how to build firewalls and routers is a relatively trivial
> exercise.  Switches are another matter entirely. . . .

A switch can also be called a bridge. FreeBSD seems to have built-in
facility for bridging. See:


http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/filtering-bridges/index.html

It isn't something I have any experience with, though.

Daniel Feenberg

>
> -- 
> Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
>