Re: Consumer-grade dual-homed connectivity options?

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>]

Brett Frankenberger wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 11:13:24AM -0500, Steven Bellovin wrote:
> > I know nothing of how to do this on a Catalyst; for PCs, my own guess
> > is that you're looking far too high-end.  If the issue is relaying to
> > the outside, I suspect that a small, dedicated Soekris or the like
> > will do all you need -- there's no point in switching traffic faster
> > than your DSL lines can run.  I'm not doing load-balancing, but all
> > traffic from my house to the outside world (I have a cable modem)
> > goes through a Soekris 4801, and I can download large files from my
> > office at 12-13M bps.  Further, since the Soekris is bridging some
> > networks, its interfaces are in promiscuous mode, so the box is
> > seeing every packet on my home LAN. 
>
> Really?  If it's connected to a switch, I'd expect it to only see
> broadcast/multicast/unknown destination MACs, as well as traffic
> actually flowing through the Soekris.

I believe he's refering to the situation where the soekris is doing the
bridging, since the soekris only has 4 ethernet ports and two pci slots
max it's likely that if you need greater than quantity 3 plus wireless
internal interfaces that you'll need a switch. given the performance
limits of even a 5501 I tend to disagree that the switching traffic
internally in software bridge at less than line rate at 100Mb/s is a
great trade-off vs say using a cheapo gig-e switch.

>      -- Brett