*BSD News Article 88473


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From: sthaug@nethelp.no (Steinar Haug)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD as router
Date: 06 Feb 1997 11:34:33 GMT
Organization: Nethelp Consulting, Trondheim, Norway
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[Eric Kennedy]

|I know that it is possible to set up FreeBSD to act as a router.  My questions 
|are: How many NIC cards (i.e. segments) can it handle?  Will it forward Bootp 
|requests?

Number of segments depends on: Traffic per segment (10 Mbps Ethernet?
100 Mbps Ethernet? etc), how powerful your processor is (and the amount
of memory bandwidth it has).

I know people have run Pentiums with 12 Ethernet segments (10 Mbps), but
I wouldn't bet on a Pentium being able to route 12 *full* Ethernets worth
of traffic on current Intel platforms. 4 to 6 Ethernets should be doable,
though - more if traffic on each segment is lower.

For bootp forwarding, you need to run a process to receive the bootp
requests and forward them - the standard TCP/IP stack won't do it for
you.

You also need to worry about reliability (power supply, disks etc). Some
people have used flash ATA cards to get increased reliability.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no