At 11:45 AM 7/17/2001 +1200, J S Russell wrote:
Possibly slightly off topic, but does anyone (Hi Richard! Hi Si!) know of a New Zealand source for gigabit nics (optical, not copper) which are (a) not priced at defence department levels, and (b) supported by linux? You can get optical nics from Netgear (Express Data) and Genius (Dove) and D-Link. We have tried all and they seem OK. I got some copper ones from Dlink in the US and they were 32 bit, all the others were 64 bit PCI, which explains our interest in 64 bit pci motherboards.
I quite like the copper ones. Copper Gig switches are getting cheaper and the GbE media converters inter operate with GBICs. There are also copper GBICs out now that will do 100m but I haven't tested any yet (but plan to asap). 1000base-T certainly does 100m (and sometimes with a bit of cat-3 stuck on the end :) The reason for the 100base-T interest is to get things cheaper. A Cisco 3508 costs about $8K from memory. Add in 8 GBICs at $800 (SX type for local servers) for a total of $6400 and your total budget is $14,400. (gee I hope this works - I've been at a Cisco course all day and my brain isn't working very well). In comparison a D-Link DES-3208 gives 2x GBIC and 6x 1000base-T for about $5500, or a Netgear F??308 costs about $3300. When you want /need to go to fiber add in a media converter just like you do with 100base-x. This is not to decry teh Cisco gear, but the IEEE team did a huge amount of work on 1000base-T based on the experiences with 100base-T. I mean with 100mbps nics at $25, you can pick where 1000base-T nics will be in 2 years time. So unless you have a really compelling reason to want fiber, use cat-5. And yes cat-5 is fine for 100m. 5e is only needed when you have some crappy terminations or mangled cables. Theres a distributor doing end of line specials in cat-5 in AKL. 25c per meter instead of the usual 42. And yes we have built gig routers - they're cool, well hot actually. And GbE media converters and GBIC work fine over couplers so you can run GbE on a single fiber at 1310nm (leaving 1550 for the second GbE :-) Was any of this in my Cisco course ? no.....my head really hurts. Hope this helps.......the other thing we have been doing is reworking Gig switches so that they can be DC powered. nznoggers outside of Wn won't know about NIDs but we mount ethernet switches up poles and feed cat-5 to houses. Transient suppression and power is tricky of course, but a decade or 2 in the power industry did teach me some tricks. So the next progression (see the D-Link DES-1009) is gig to the NID with 10/100 to the home. Kinda makes cable and dsl look slow. Sorry to ramble........... richard.naylor(a)citylink.co.nz --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog