Ethernet switches: Good for isolating traffic... but they aren't
typically programmable nor are they really useful for much else.
Inrastructure... (a programmable one might be useful)
this is kind of a drag. university of new hampshire had a very nice test lab
setup with dynamically programmable switches that would allow software
consutrction of broadcast regimes. unfortunately that company went
out of business and we had problems finding a simliar product...I can
look into this
as part of the base pc purchase we should probably get switched
ethernet just for performance reasons, and pay the extra to get one or
two gig ports...a brief look shows this is a common enough switch that
hopefully prices wont be too dismal
onto the more speculative stuff:
the only reason we would want a cisco is if we really expected to peer
bgp for real (although there are commerical pc-based bgp solutions
which would probably be acceptable also). UCLA just sent out a report
today about how they were finally able to get something on the netstar
running, but its probably something to stay away from unless we are
pushing the high end. a 200mhz pentium pro with a standard 33mhz/32bit
pci bus will do ~120k packets per second (and not much else). thats
generally enough to handle normal loads on several ~100Mb interfaces
(fddi, ether, atm)
OC-3/12-Mon: Essentially a PC with some ATM cards and an optical
tap. This would be great for doing traces... if only we had an
interesting OC-3 line we could trace.
I think we already have everything we need in house to put together
an oc3mon. the oc12 hardware is probably worth holding off on, I'm
also not sure about is general availability.
Modem bank: You can get something like 64 phone lines in a single
rack unit. If we wanted to mess around with out own improved dial up
service then this might be useful. Unclear yet though what our research
contribution would be...
this probably isn't the most useful thing right now, although
they aren't very expensive. I seem to remember that you can get a
single-t1 channelized ascend max for somewhere in the 5k range
I have to admit I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the general level of
network management software. the overhead of developing custom
applications inside frameworks such as hp open view or sun net manager
vastly outweighs any potential benefit over creating some random tk
hack. I think there's probably more hope in the commerical site-wide
administration tools, but I don't have experience with any to be able
to tell