possible router platforms

[James Knott]

Walter Dnes wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 03:04:52PM -0400, James Knott wrote
>    
>> Walter Dnes wrote:
>>      
>>> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 12:39:01PM -0400, James Knott wrote
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>>>> How many people have an internet connection that's better than 100
>>>> Mb/s?  I expect many could get by with a 10 Mb NIC.
>>>>
>>>>          
>>>     If you only have one computer, yes.  But if you have more than one
>>> machine, and want to transfer files between them, a gigabit connection
>>> is nice.
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>> Then you'd need Gb NICs on those computers.  The NIC on the router is
>> irrelevant for local traffic.  It's only when you connect to the
>> internet or another network that you'd pass through the router.
>>      
>    I have only 1 router/modem, with 3 machines behind it.  In addition to
> NATing my internet connection, the router/modem also handles traffic
> between my machines...
>
> _____________     ___
> | machine A |-    |R|
> ------------- \   |O|
> _____________  ---|U|  internet
> | machine B |-----|T|==========>
> -------------  ___|E|
> _____________ /   |R|
> | machine C |-    ---
> -------------
>
>    Connecting to the internet uses the same cat5 cable and jacks and NIC
> as connecting to one of the other machines behind the router.  What am I
> missing?  Is there really an money saved by having 1 Gbit connections
> locally and 10 or 100 megabits on the internet side?
>
>    
What you're missing is that most consumer routers have a built in 4 port 
Ethernet switch, which must be able to pass the desired bandwidth for 
local traffic.  Behind that switch is the actual router.  In the 
situation where you're using a computer for a router, as I do, the 
switch and router are separate boxes.  The computer will have at least 2 
Ethernet ports, one for the local network via the switch and one for the 
Internet connection.  Since only traffic for the Internet passess 
through the router, it doesn't need NICs that are faster than the 
Internet connection.  The computer mentioned in the original post had 2 
Ethernet ports and would require a separate switch to connect more than 
one computer to the Internet.

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists