Hi Nicholas and Roman, Thanks for your comments.
On Fri, 2006-04-21 at 09:26 -0700, Nicholas Weaver wrote: > On Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 12:21:42PM -0400, Roman Chertov composed: > > > > Alastair McKinley wrote: > > > Hi everyone, > > > > > > Apologies for the slightly off topic question. > > > > > > I want to run Click on a powerful machine with lots of interfaces > > > (10-50, the more the better), and I was hoping that someone here might > > > have an idea what to look for. > > > > > > I guess I want e1000 NICS to support polling. Can I buy such a beast > > > off the shelf or should I build my own? If I were to build it, what > > > would I get to support enough e1000 NICS? > > > > I know that you can buy multi-port Intel Pros (e1000). So you can get > > by with fewer cards. I think 4 is the maximum. That would require you > > to have 10 PCI slots to get 40 ports. I am not sure who builds such > > motherboards. Also you want the motherboard to have PCI-E bus to allow > > for maximum throughput. Ideally you would use a at least two processors > > for this thing. Although I think this all depends on what traffic you > > expect to deal with. If you expect the traffic to be small then you can > > get buy with a lesser machine. > > One comment: How much bandwidth do you expect to be pulling? > > It might be substantially cheaper & easier to have a 48 port managed > ethernet switch, and use fixed VLAN configurations to concentrate it > down to 8 Gigabit cards in the host. Since there is no whay you'd be > able to support high bandwidth for 10+ ports in software, you might as > well have the switch handle the port multiplexing etc. > > The bandwidth I'm expecting is quite low. Average about 8Mbits/port. I'm trying to analyse and process the traffic from a number of different hosts using Click. Unfortunately each host needs to be connected to a unique interface. I haven't eliminated the idea of abandoning this approach altogether, but I would like to give it a try. So I guess I could get 4-5 4-port e1000 PCI-E NICS and stick them on a motherboard with 4-5 PCI-E slots? Once again, thanks everyone for your comments. Alastair _______________________________________________ click mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://amsterdam.lcs.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/click
