[geeks] bye bye Cisco...

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

I think Cisco is in for some trouble ...

I was up until about 3:30 AM last night / this morning struggling with
the new 10megs Ethernet handoff for my rack.  The SONET connected fiber
just hands off whatever is set on the remote Cisco switch, so I had to
have 10mbps, full-duplex operation.

The Cisco 4000M I was using, does not have ports that can be put into
full-duplex mode, only half-duplex.  This turned my 10megs into a very
expensive T1, as that was the sort of speed I was getting.

Remember that 4000's used to cost some serious money -for Cisco to have
let it go out the door without making sure FDX was working is pretty
bad.  I assume most didn't notice it because they were most often used
for bonding multiple T1's together.

I had an old Dell PowerEdge 2550, P3/933, 768MB RAM, with two NICs.  I
put OpenBSD on it, set up the firewall and routing rules, and then put
that into place.  

Once I got the weird duplex problems figured out ( I ended up having to
use an old Cisco switch and force the ports to 10mbps full-duplex), I
was able to pull 1.1Mbytes/sec via SCP across the firewall/router.  Load
average for this time period:  0.09 .

If I have a problem with the system, I will use CARP to failover to
another machine I will have in place, and not even lose firewall state.

To approach Cisco MTBF's all I need is CompactFlash and a case with dual
power supplies... for what, 10% of the cost vs. Cisco?

--Patrick