Brett Frankenberger wrote: > On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:13:24AM -0500, Steven Bellovin wrote: >> I know nothing of how to do this on a Catalyst; for PCs, my own guess >> is that you're looking far too high-end. If the issue is relaying to >> the outside, I suspect that a small, dedicated Soekris or the like >> will do all you need -- there's no point in switching traffic faster >> than your DSL lines can run. I'm not doing load-balancing, but all >> traffic from my house to the outside world (I have a cable modem) >> goes through a Soekris 4801, and I can download large files from my >> office at 12-13M bps. Further, since the Soekris is bridging some >> networks, its interfaces are in promiscuous mode, so the box is >> seeing every packet on my home LAN. > > Really? If it's connected to a switch, I'd expect it to only see > broadcast/multicast/unknown destination MACs, as well as traffic > actually flowing through the Soekris.
I believe he's refering to the situation where the soekris is doing the bridging, since the soekris only has 4 ethernet ports and two pci slots max it's likely that if you need greater than quantity 3 plus wireless internal interfaces that you'll need a switch. given the performance limits of even a 5501 I tend to disagree that the switching traffic internally in software bridge at less than line rate at 100Mb/s is a great trade-off vs say using a cheapo gig-e switch. > -- Brett >
