Re: future of IDS

[Doug Hughes <doug () Eng Auburn EDU>]

On Sat, 24 Oct 1998, Darren Reed wrote:

> In some email I received from Doug Hughes, sie wrote:
> > Darren Reed writes:
> > > Something which just occurred to me, switches are `meant' to be able to
> > > switch such that full speed communications are kept between any two nodes
> > > on the switch without taking bandwidth away from other pairs.
> > >
> > > If you have a switch with 24 ports for 100BaseT, can you then push 1.2Gb/s
> > > through it ?  Or is that just the `gigabit' hubs ?  The problem is, that
> > > if you have a single 100BaseT monitor port, either than throughput for the
> > > entire switch is 100BaseT (serious reduction in performance) or you lose
> > > packets on the monitor port.
> > That's what the gigabit uplink ports are for. There may be vendors that
> > let you funnel all your 100Mbit and dup it out a gig, but I'm not aware
> > of them. But yes, the switch backplane better be capable of approaching
> > 1.2Gb, and most of them are these days.
>
> I have just one problem with this: how do I plug my PC into one of those
> gigabit uplink ports ?

Are you talking about the proprietary port (which is a matrix port) or an
actual gigabit uplink? The actual standardized gigabit uplink ports you
might be able to. The thing is, most of them are currently the fiber
ports, and I'm not aware of a 1000FL NIC card. However, several vendors
do have a 1000BaseT card on the market (maybe 3-4? Don't remember who..
relatively new stuff). But, then you significantly lose distance. I
don't think it's quite there yet. Most of the Gig switches are fiber based
assuming you're plugging into an uplink of some other 100BaseT switch.
I imagine there must be 'somebody' that sells a 1000BaseT switch, or
what use would a NIC card be??
 (maybe coming soon? Probably see a few at the next Interop in Las Vegas)

> Also, I imagine that the protocol on those connectors is proprietry, so
> even if you could connect it, making sense of it would be the next trick.
Okay, so you're talking about the matrix backplane on something like 
a 3com 3300 or 1100. Yes, that's proprietary, but, you can buy regular
1000 FL uplink cards that plugin to the 3300s that are not proprietary.
The matrix is used for the stacking. I'm not even sure if all packets
touch it. They may not go out the matrix unless they are 
heading to a different switch on the stack. But yes, like I said, they
are most likely not about to give away their market leading edge on this
one.. ;)

____________________________________________________________________________
Doug Hughes                                     Engineering Network Services
System/Net Admin                                Auburn University
                        doug () eng auburn edu