High end network routing,

[Brian D. McGrew]

A couple of quick questions and a sanity check ... I have a very large 
network that i need to subnet and seperate out into VLANS and I want to 
use Linux.

Right now, what I have are three Cisco Catalyst WS3548-XL switches.  I 
need to create four VLANS, Admin/Sales, Engineering, Software and 
Manufacturing.  I have a Cisco 2610 behind a Checkpoint firewall, load 
balancing two T1's out to the world.

What I'm thinking about doing is setting up a Linux box (Fedora Core 2) 
with five ethernet interfaces in it.  The existing switches will not do 
Layer 3 routing but they will share the VLAN segments.

So, if I were to have the four VLANS, set the Linux box as the router 
for all four and then make the fifth interface in the box my connection 
to the outside world, would this work?  How would I go about 
configuring routing on the Linux host so that all the networks can 
talk?  And lastly, assuming that I'm going to be using a 100MB 
connections between everything (as opposed to gig), what kind of speed 
constraints am I looking at?  A consultant trying to sell me a $17k 
Foundry switch is telling me that the new switch will route at 'wire' 
speed but I was under the impression that a Linux box would do the same 
thing?

Any help would be great here, I really don't have the luxury of 
spending $17k on a new switch right now but I need to revive a failing 
network.

Thanks,

-brian

Brian D. McGrew		{ brian at doubledimension.com || 
pacemakertaker at yahoo.com }
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