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? JSR -- John S Russell | "What the hell is he building in there... Operations Manager | he has a router...and a table saw..." Attica/Callplus NZ | - Tom Waits, Mule Variations --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
SX or LX? The cheapest we have that go in linux are some of the 1000baseSX D-Link ones, with Lucent silicon. Whoever the distributors are (Renaissance?) should be able to quote. The performance suffers however, apparently. Might be better of paying a bit more if you need stellar performance. The other place to check would be to read the kernel tree for cards/chips that have drivers, and go from there... Stephen. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen Donnelly (BCMS) email: sfd(a)cs.waikato.ac.nz WAND Group Room GG.15 phone +64 7 838 4086 Computer Science Department, University of Waikato, New Zealand ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
At 11:45 AM 7/17/2001 +1200, J S Russell wrote:
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
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 06:23:20PM +1200, Richard Naylor wrote: 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. I would love to know where you can get a decent 100mbs NIC for $25 these days. Anything reasonable costs typically three times that I find. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
At 09:39 PM 7/17/2001 +1200, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
Dick Smith. Maybe decent was the qualifer......I think we pay $35 for D-Link. BTW you REALLY do need GbE at home. Being a good fellow (TM) I decided that I would take a copy of a Corrs video screened on TV3 to work for the others to watch. After I snipped out the ads its a 465meg file, nothing too major. Well I'm living in patch cord hell at home (I suspect one of the offspring has given me a dud cord and the tester is in my van outside in the rain), so the nic on my laptop isn't going. So I decided to use the wireless lan to copy the file to my laptop for carrying to work. (Van-net ?). Sheesh - even in the same room as the Airport, Windoze reckons it will take 81 minutes ! Last time I shifted a file from the edit pc to the server (both on GbE) it took 6 minutes for 1.6 Gig. I wonder if I can get a GbE PC card for the laptop ? Yes I know a CD burner would fix it, but thats busy at the mo. 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
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 09:40:01PM +1200, Richard Naylor wrote: Dick Smith. Maybe decent was the qualifer......I think we pay $35 for D-Link. The only D-Link cards I've ever used are 530TX or something. They are not even close to what I call decent. What chipset do the ones you have use? Last time I shifted a file from the edit pc to the server (both on GbE) it took 6 minutes for 1.6 Gig. I wonder if I can get a GbE PC card for the laptop ? Ah.. this is why I say decent card. I expect a 100mbps card to run at 100mbps or very near to it. 1.6G in 6 minutes, that's 4.5 megabytes/s or so? Earlier this year I did some testing or various NICs and could sustain over 12 megabytes/s for several hours, even when this data came off a disk one one machine and onto a disk on another machine. Yes I know a CD burner would fix it, but thats busy at the mo. No, you were right the first time. Everything should be network connected, everything. I don't care if its a loaf of bread, it should be pingable. CDs, roms, writers, whatever are all evil. Just like floppy disks. Everything should have a network connection and some kind of local storage. Life would be so much simpler then. Oh, and no --- you cannot get GE for laptops, I've tried. As soon as you can, I want it though. I *need* it. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:41:35PM +1200, Chris Wedgwood said:
the 530TX's are pretty old
What chipset do the ones you have use?
the 538TX's are RTL8139C - they'll stand 11.5MByte's without difficulty (that's ftp-server -> router -> router -> ftp-client , with RTL8139C's on the routers, various odd cards at either end along the way, so who knows where the bottleneck is). I guess if you want 12MB/s, then you get what you pay for, but once you get up to that level then driver and OS variations can make as much difference as card selection.
I'd agree that richard's gigE performance sounds terrible, I'd suspect it's cause he insists upon putting fast cards in crap old gear. We all know that gigE at home is only for pose value :-).
Oh, and no --- you cannot get GE for laptops, I've tried. As soon as you can, I want it though. I *need* it.
Won't we all... Cheers Si --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 11:42:46PM +1200, Simon Blake wrote: the 538TX's are RTL8139C - they'll stand 11.5MByte's without difficulty (that's ftp-server -> router -> router -> ftp-client , with RTL8139C's on the routers, various odd cards at either end along the way, so who knows where the bottleneck is). 8139, god, how awful. I bet they chew wads of CPU too. By the looks of things, they use a single linear ring for Rx (meaning some CPU is required to copy to mbufs, skbufs or whatever). Perhaps *BSD allow mbufs with pointers within this frame, not sure. For Tx you have a grand total of four descriptors with nasty alignement requirements. Does there even exist a PCI chipset worse than this? There is more to networking that just 'it works fast', presumably the host also has to do something, and in many cases that something is non-trivial and requires many CPU cycles, if your spending a great many cycles copying data into and out of network buffers, you don't want to have to recopy just to suit crappy network hardware. At 100M, most people who just copy files about probably won't need anything special. Once people move to GE, the need to smarts is more apparent. Consider something like an 8139 (which doesn't AFAIK support interrupt mitigation) running at GE speed with small datagrams (stream media perhaps?). It just won't happen. In fact, most modern hardware will melt with small datagrams at 100M. For the average luse95 users, an 8139 will probably work wonderfully. Personally, I'll spend a little more and use something else. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
OK, at the risk of getting sneered at by the hardware gurus, I'll have a go.
Or if you want to go for a less well renowned but more widely supported chipset Dove and Dick Smith will both sell you RTL8139C based cards for less than $30. Sure, they're not the greatest, but they'll stand up 100Mb without any difficulty. YMWV, of course. Cheers Si On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 09:39:29PM +1200, Chris Wedgwood said:
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Richard Naylor wrote:
At 11:45 AM 7/17/2001 +1200, J S Russell wrote:
mucho deleted.....
Ah, the joys of my favourite and personal network provider..... There is one vital fact that has been missed though.... any financial advantage accrued through the economics espoused above, is completely negated by the scale of the PC wreckage around Simon's desk. I've seen it... in fact it run's over two desks....., around the floor past the aerials, over the carpet.... who needs $25 NIC cards when you can sidle up to Si's desk and suggest humbly that "this has been here 6 months.....would you mind if I tested it..." Dean can vouch for me, so this email can be seen to vendor independenet........ :-) -- \_ Roger De Salis Cisco Systems NZ Ltd
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:35:15PM +1200, Roger De Salis wrote:
Alas it's all true. Flash's desk is starting to look just as bad though - and then there's the store room =) Not many people I know have the sort of job that Si does. Imagine if we all had this ammount of stuff lying around work that was availible for "offsite testing" Roger would have a 12416 running his network and I'd have an M160 full of GigE for mine (that would be until I could find some oc-192 pci cards =) ) *sigh* such is life. Dean --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 06:12:22AM +1200, Dean Pemberton wrote: Imagine if we all had this ammount of stuff lying around work that was availible for "offsite testing" Roger would have a 12416 running his network connected to 10M interfaces, just to make sure all features are supported :) and I'd have an M160 full of GigE for mine (that would be until I could find some oc-192 pci cards =) ) You can push that much over a PCI bus, but with GSN on the Origins you get close. Lucent have OC-48 cards available, and I know of faster stuff comming which will be PCI-X only. --cw --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 10:35:15PM +1200, Roger De Salis said:
Ohh puhleese. The wreckage is inconsequential - a few drives, some RAM, some networking hardware - nothing of any great interest, and in any case, most of it's on it's way out to customers, or maybe Dean :-). OTOH, I wandered around the Logical offices the other day, and saw ten's of thousands of dollars worth of gear lying around. Or maybe you're suggesting that they in fact do have similar real value?
4/4/01. Mike Volpi, Cisco's chief strategy officer, announces four key markets: VOIP, wireless LANs, content networking, streaming media.
I see our Mike still hasn't found his core networks, then? :-) Cheers Si --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Wed, 18 Jul 2001, Dean Pemberton wrote:
I'm unavailible for comment
Please remove Dean from your archives. -- Regards, Juha PGP fingerprint: B7E1 CC52 5FCA 9756 B502 10C8 4CD8 B066 12F3 9544 --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
participants (9)
-
Chris Wedgwood -
Dean Pemberton -
J S Russell -
Juha Saarinen -
Philip Beckmann -
Richard Naylor -
Roger De Salis -
Simon Blake -
Stephen Donnelly