a decent Cisco
or at least, I think it’s a decent one… ^_^
Since I finished my OS-upgrade cycle, I was also looking into what else I could do in my home network. Well, to be little more correct and totally honest, that’s something I’m always looking into… ^_^
Every now and then I look around sites like eBay to see for what prices certain hardware is changing hands and lately I was looking into Ciscos (again). Now I’ve got a Cisco 2610 and as you can see in this document, that one is running at its maximum on my current 6Mbps cable connection… But since I’m planning on upgrading my connection somewhere in the near future (ADSL2+ 20mbps connections are quite cheap overhere), I would also need a spiffier router to handle traffic of around 20Mbps properly…
click to enlarge
Now of course, these routers, a Cisco 3640A in my case, with 128MB memory and 32MB flash, with 2 ethernet-devices (NM-2E2W), are already totally obsolete in production-environments and their official life ended three years ago, but that’s also the reason I was able to pick one up at only a small percentage (2% ?) of its original retail price ^_^
...configuring…
click to go to the pic on flickr
Now, even though I had a good deal with this Cisco, it came with ethernet-devices (2× 10Mbps) which is fine on my current cable-connection, but if I would upgrade to, say, ADSL2+, I’d also need a NM-2FE2W (or 2x NM-1FE2W) and those still seem to go for, well, decent prices... Well, I still got time and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to pick up fast-ethernet-devices for this baby for a reasonable price any time soon… We’ll see…
some Cisco-pr0n:
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But, this Cisco is only one part of the obsolete hardware upgrade-cycle… I’ll continue on something I tried earlier… and for that I’ve been buying similar class gear (for similar low prices ^_^)
There’s more hardware on its way and the beauty on the picture below is meant for a machine which isn’t here yet…
click to enlarge
ah well, the difference between men and boys is the price of their toys and in my case, that’s only a small percentage of the original retail price…
*^_^*
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“Now I’ve got a Cisco 2610 and as you can see in this document, that one is running at its maximum on my current 6Mbps cable connection…”
Yeah but that’s with 64-packet bytes. That’s basically its minimum capacity. I’m no cisco fan, but even that 2600 can do better than that ;) In theory, it should be able to route about 20mbits/sec assuming it has FE ports.
Eh, 64-byte packets of course.
Well… in their documentation, they call it ‘the platforms “never-to-exceed” performance’... I guess there are more boundaries than the routing-engine alone. Get this, on my current flaky connection (which sometimes tops 10Mbps) I’ve hardly seen more than 500pps… (which gives a MTU of +/- 1500, which makes sense) but this 3640 should be able to handle 50,000-70,000pps. On full throttle I get around 10% CPU-usage… still, I do think it’ll crap out at the given 25-35Mbps, so I guess there’s only one thing to do… load’er full of fancy options! (it’s only doing NAT at the moment)
Oh, I did buy FE-cards (two of them) for this Cisco and about the 2600… its ‘never-to-exceed performance’ is 7.68Mbps and afaik there are no FE-devices for that platform (which makes sense I guess).