Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote:
I've been asked to hunt for hardware that meets roughly these specs:
* preferably in a 1u, space for two autonomous machines with as many
Ethernet interfaces as will physically fit the form factor
* Gigabit capable
Here's a 1U with 4x gigE + 4x FE. I haven't tried this model, though
I've had great experiences with Nexcom's other offerings, particularly
their no-moving-parts "NICE" series.
There's a bunch of other similar systems listed here:
http://code.google.com/p/bsd-appliance/w/list
Also, if you want to cram two boxes in 1U and still have a decent number
of NICs, check out ABMX:
http://www.abmx.com/1u-twin-server
Each node has 2xGigE onboard, plus a PCI slot, which you can add a
4xGigE card into for a total of 12GigE ports in 1U.
I can also vouch for ABMX as a company-- they're good guys, I've done a
decent bit of business with them, (actually I just ordered more
equipment this morning,) and I've never regretted ordering from them.
Oftentimes they'll test install openbsd on a server for me if I ask nicely.
Anything else is really just a bonus, 'works with OpenBSD' is a must,
onboard graphics, sound etc is totally irellevant, humans will
interact physically with this only rarely if we do this right. The
location is in northern Europe, anybody who is not scared of shipping
there is fine with us.
Any war stories, notes or anecdotes (including don't do this, go for
$foo instead) welcome. The amount of misleadingly tagged webshop
pages stuffed to the brim with inane animated and barely related ads
sort of got to me at one point.
Peter, why are you trying to terminate a bunch of GigE ports directly
onto PC-based routers instead of using [redundant?] switches+VLANs and
trunking a pair of gigE ports back to each router? Do you actually
expect to *route* Nx1 gigabits of traffic over your router? Or are you
just trying to aggregate a bunch of ports?
If space is an issue, and "ugly" is OK, then just dump a mac mini or two
on a shelf mounted in reverse in the back of your cabinet behind a
switch ... sort of like these guys:
http://www.fubra.com/blog/2007/10/mac-mini-bgp-routers-part-2.html
Cheers,
Tico
