On Mon, 2004-03-22 at 11:39, michiel wrote: > Dear cal. > > My few cent for this layout. > Hardware: > I had some problems with a incompatble 3com 3C905 carts.(don't now wy) > check them before you start.
3Com NICs have proven pretty reliable for me, but I always take them through the diagnostics before using them. I know the 2.4 kernel modules can handle them. > I think that the "old" hardware is even to fast for this setup. > I like to use old pentium 166 for routers becouse you can down clock > them to slower machiens that produse less head and need no active > cooling. (every moving part gives trouble after a wile) > Also posible to overclock the pci bus from 33 to 40mhz. ( I have not don > it jet but I am planning a test setup.) > The pci bus has its limitations I think you will find those faster then > the processor speed. Two main reasons for the selection of "New Hardware": (1) rack-mount, passive backplane chassis allows simple SBC (CPU) changes & dual cooling fans, and (2) DiskOnChip modules or Flash RAM replace hard drives. Choice of SBC determined by availability of DOC sockets, integrated controllers, RAM, and cost. > Myself I stoped using diskdrive's for the os. My 3 routers were standing > in a non heated envirment and after a cold period the disk were always > damaged. Using old 170mb hd for it now. Just using 4.7mb of space on > them. > Using 32mb of memory and still a lot of space left I'm only using the hard drives for initial building, configuration, and testing. They'll be removed in the new machines when they'll boot and run from DOC. > Layout: > In youre setup the routers wil be crusial to network operation. > If you duble routers 1, 2 and 3 you can get more redundancy in youre > planning and easyer implementation. > Separate network for wireless and dsl for example. I'm not real clear on what you mean by doubling the routers. If you are talking about dividing responsibility for some of the paths (interfaces) off to 2nd machine at each of the locations, I don't think this would be best. First, our budget currently won't support purchase of duplicate hardware. Second, it means more to manage for an already overworked staff. When the budget will support additional purchases, I'd favor a fail-over Linux cluster configuration, moving to a split passive backplane with multi-port Ethernet cards. I certainly could press some old PC's into service, but network closets don't have much room and recycled PC's tend to produce more heat and have less efficient air flow than rack-mount chassis. > Routing: > You have to wach out for the problem that if the dsl at the corp network > go's down that packeges don't get send around in circles over the > wireless network and get in a endles loop. That will bring the hole > network down in mather of seconds. Would you expect this to be a problem with multi-path routing? I'll be sure to simulate bringing down each link when the new routers are deployed to see if this happens. I thought that the BGP daemon on the affected router would be smart enough to detect the dead link and notify its neighbors so they could pass the traffic through an open link to the same destination, in theory through next available link with the most bandwidth. > Conclusion: > It looks like a verrie nice project. > But I think you need to split the network up for bether managemend and > redundancy. > Then some machiens will be router and some will be firewall > Keep me informed. > Anny questions mail me. Willing to help. Even with my bad english. Thanks for the comments and offer to help. I'm hoping to return to this project this week. I just had an RF link go down so my time is pretty divided right now. --Cal Webster ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click ------------------------------------------------------------------------ leaf-user mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-user SR FAQ: http://leaf-project.org/pub/doc/docmanager/docid_1891.html