Brand Name Server With Many Slots

  • Thread starter Thread starter Will
  • Start date Start date
W

Will

Does Dell, Compaq/HP, or IBM make a 4U server that has lots of
slots in the back? I would like at least 10 PCI-66 slots or
better, to build a firewall with a large number of ports. I
intend to fill the box with four port ethernet cards.
 
No such puppy. You'd run out of IRQ resources before you'd fill them up,
even with sharing. You'd be better off using a smaller number of NICs and
assigning multiple IPs/VLANs to each physical port.

If you insist on doing this, a better approach would be to use USB NICs.
Theoretically, you could get 127 on each USB controller you installed. I
figure a good PC-99 standard MB will have 6 PCI slots, so you'd get 762 NICs
installed (theoretically, of course -- I've never heard of anybody getting
more than 110 devices working on a USB bus, and far less with multiple USB
controllers).

Better bet would be to get a Cisco or a Juniper to handle this. ASICs are
much more capable of doing MAC matching/translation/ACL chores than an intel
x86 class CPU.
 
Is there a straightforward way of telling the switch to move all
traffic from Port X to a port owned by the firewall, and to not
respond to any Mac requests from other ports? What is the name
for this capability?

I don't want to hassle with VLANs as there is too much
configuration work involved, and for a firewall it is way too
error-prone. I'm not thrilled with even having to configure a
switch to connect specific ports to a port attached to the
firewall, but as a worst case I could do it.
 
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