[K12OSN] Linux Router

[Josiah Ritchie]

On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 10:23, Joe O'Brien wrote:
> I've been running a Linux box with 4 ethernet cards in it as my primary
> router/firewall and have been pleased with its performance/stability.  Most
> of the school's network is run on 10Mbit Hubs, so my next thought was to
> replace the 4 ethernet cards with (4) 4port ethernet cards and run it as a
> 16 port 10/100 switch/router/firewall, and if successful, replace some of
> those Hubs with a 16 port linux box. We cannot afford to buy enough layer2
> or layer3 switches to make a significant dent in replacing our 10Mbit hubs,
> but for the price of (1) layer3 switch, I could move almost the entire
> network over 10/100....if this would actually work.  Does anyone have any
> opinions or suggestions?

How much are you getting a 4-port ethernet card for? You can get a
decent enough 16-port unmanaged switch from Dell for about $100. You can
find it elsewhere for significantly less. Going with that kind of
hardware you open yourself up to a much larger chance of failure and
more complicated problems when it does fail.

That said, I've thought about it too. It would be fun to just see it
work, but running a firewall on it would be a nightmare trying to keep
all the different NICs straight. I'd probably separate the firewall
feature out to another box for manageability. Routing wouldn't be so
bad, but I'd probably also consider swapping that out if I had the boxen
to do it. Again for manageability purposes.

JSR/