I work for a small hosting company, and the boss says he wants to start doing BGP for our upstream connection. This means I've got to learn BGP. At least I've managed to persuade him to buy me an O'Reilly book :-) However, the other thing I demanded was a test network of some kind. BGP is one of the few things where, if I get it wrong, I could mess up other people's stuff as well as my own. He said fine, here's a few pennies to do it with. Not nearly enough to buy even a couple of crap machines off ebay.
Then, an idea occured to me. We have half a dozen old HP t5125[0] thin clients, which have been unused since we upgraded our desktops to proper boxes. The plan: get half a dozen 512MB USB sticks, install 4.0 on them, boot off them, and bing! One test network. They're only 400MHz machines with 128MB of RAM, but I think they'll do for playing with routing, BGP et al, given what you can acieve with a Soekris. My questions: Am I on a hiding to nothing here? Am I missing anything obvious? I plan to use the vlan driver to pretend to have more than one ethernet interface, with them all plugged in to a cheapo 8 port switch. Am I right in thinking that the dumb switch will just pass vlan tagged packets through without poking them, or am I going to encounter issues? I don't mind poking at things and playing round till it works, but given the possibility of vlans not working over dumb switches, I figured I'd ask if I was on a hiding to nothing before I started. Also, if anyone has any suggestions or comments, I'm all ears :-) [0] http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-321959-89307-338927-89307-472257.html -- Richard 'Dave' Wilson Systems Administrator Senokian Solutions Ltd. Business Innovation Centre, Binley Business Park, Coventry, United Kingdom CV3 2TX T: +44 (0)24 76 233 400 DDI: +44 (0)24 76 233 416 F: +44 (0)24 76 233 401
