Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
> At 11:18 PM -0700 12/18/99, Wes Peters wrote:
> >Matthew Dillon wrote:
> > > Prices have fallen a lot in the last year. I'm happy to be able to
> > > get rid of my HUBs, I was constantly having to deal with packet loss
> > > when running saturation tests and never able to figure out what
> > > was causing it.
> >
> >Switches are a better solution, no doubt about it. They are well worth
> >the cost, even if you're just trying to pep up an old 10Base-T network.
> >Investing in 10Base-T switches at this time is a false economy; for only
> >a few dollars more per port you can get 10/100 switches like yours and
> >upgrade machines to Fast Ethernet as budget allows.
>
> Getting back to the topic of switches, I've recently bought three
> different "reasonably cheap" 10/100 switches for some testing.
> One thing I would have liked to have had was an option to "mirror"
> the traffic of one port on some other port.
> [...] but I was wondering how
> much one has to fork out before you get extra options like a
> port-mirroring capability...
Lots more, in terms of dollars. For this, you need at least a managed
switch, and probably a smart switch. I know for a fact this one, a
24-port 10Base-T switch with 2 10/100 uplink ports, supports port mirroring
and hundreds of other features -- about $1100:
http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/1,10231,0-11726-311-1459828-3,00.html?tag=st.sh.11726-311-1459828.sort.price
For 24 100Base-TX ports, you step up to about $2100:
http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/resellers/1,10231,0-11726-311-794908-3,00.html?tag=st.sh.11726-311-794908.sort.price
For more info about both, see:
http://www.ind.alcatel.com/enterprise/products/omnistack/ost04.html
Note that these are "Layer 3" switches with VLAN support, IP and IPX routing,
etc. The per-port prices aren't that different than the simpler managed
switches, but the port count tends to be high.
Caveat: I work on these things daily. Consider whatever I say about them
to be evangelism. Also note that turning on software-dependent features
like port mirroring can do terrible things to your throughput if not used
judiciously.
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://softweyr.com/
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