From: Ben Holko (ben.holko@datacom.com.au)
Date: Thu Nov 08 2007 - 09:07:29 ART
Hey all,
There have been several informative posts and topics (thanks Scott V!)
on using things such as a MAC Mini and USB Ethernet to link your
Dynamips routers to REAL switches - and I suddenly got to thinking, why
use USB at all?
Why cant we run up 802.1Q sub interfaces in Linux, run a trunk into a L2
802.1Q switch (say a 2950), and then connect out of the 2950 into our
REAL 4 x 3550/3560 with one cable per logical router interface (say one
vlan in the 3000 range for each router interface)?
It's basically the same premise as using the 16 x USB Ethernet adapters,
but using an extra switch and 802.1Q subinterfaces on Linux instead, to
break out into one physical cable per Dynamips router interface.
Can you configure Dynamips to map each router interface to a separate
logical Linux 802.1Q interface? I will be trying it when I get back from
interstate next week.
The reason I got to thinking this, is my Linux Dynamips box (a Dell 2650
PowerEdge) is not liking its USB controller, and it has a second
10/100/1000 Broadcom NIC sitting idle - the 5th switch required to
perform physical interface break-out could be anything that supports
802.1Q, doesn't even have to be a Cisco, which would potentially make it
even cheaper than the USB approach!
Any thoughts?
Ben
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Dec 01 2007 - 06:37:28 ART