Gigabit Networking for the Home? 545
The Clockwork Troll asks: "I've had a whole-house audio/video distribution project on the back-burner for a while now. As gigabit networking hardware prices come down to earth, I'm tempted to jump on the 1000BaseTX bandwagon. As far as I can tell though, the current crop of consumer-priced hardware/software doesn't address a couple key issues, namely: fragmenting jumbo frames for the benefit of legacy clients - this is critical as some of the devices on my network will not tolerate the 9000+ byte Ethernet frames which are needed to get the most out of gigabit; and OS support - do Linux and Windows require much tweaking to take advantage of gigabit? Will most drivers automatically optimize themselves? A Google search didn't reveal too much consensus, especially on hardware choices. What switches and software configurations have Slashdot readers been using for home gigabit networks, in particular mixed ones (100/1000BaseTX?"
Why stop at 1000baseTX? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Why stop at 1000baseTX? (Score:3, Informative)
It's 1000baseSX or 1000baseLX
Use 1000baseLX, have a GigE connection to friends and family miles away.
8 port Asante GX5-800P (Score:4, Informative)
Re:8 port Asante GX5-800P (Score:5, Informative)
Now to actually get a RAID setup that can load this thing to capacity...
Re:8 port Asante GX5-800P (Score:5, Funny)
Everything is running smooth now, with the exception of the bathroom subnet. The Juniper gear doesn't like the moisture.
Re:8 port Asante GX5-800P (Score:5, Funny)
I guess that would do for amateur installations, but any serious home network engineer deploying gigabit would opt for something with a little more kick. I recommend the Cisco Catalyst 3750G-24T switch for these kinds of applications. 24 ports of 10/100/1000 managed switch goodness and only $4000!! That's unbelievable! Now, if you're you're looking at a modular solution with possibilities of doubling as a router then look no further than the Catalyst 4500 series. Bump up to a 4507R and get redundant supervisor IV support and 5 slots for adding in module goodies.
For those of us network geeks with serious port density needs at home, I would recommend purchasing a Catalyst 6513 w/redundant sup 720's (makes a kickass cable/DSL router w/reflexive access list support and even server load balancing of your home web servers!). If you're interested in protecting your network of Windows and Linux boxes, throw in a PIX firewall blade and the IDS blade and you're rockin'.
Now, I suppose you're saying "but all I need is a $160 8 port switch" in which case I'd say you're not a real networking geek. I suppose you buy those cheapo $40 Linksys switches instead of a proper Cisco Catalyst 3500XL series managed 10/100 switch too right? Fucking amateurs.
Re:8 port Asante GX5-800P (Score:3, Interesting)
No rackmount arcnet hub, for the TRS-80 Model II that runs the thermostat software?
No Synoptics 3030 with 3 Lattistalk blades (switched localtalk) for those old Mac SE's running the custom, undocumented Filemaker db's?
What about econet, 4mps token ring or FDDI? Do you have any ATM25 or ATM155 for those Alcatel DSL modems that will do atm rather than ethernet?
My god man, w
Gotta shuttle (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Gotta shuttle (Score:2)
What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if your needs are more extensive you may need something more...
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:2)
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, 100Mbit is cheap enough that you could always just install that first and then expand if you need more. If you just make sure that the cable you're running can handle gigabit, you can always plunk down more money later for a gigabit switch and NICs, to replace the $15 NICs and $50 switch you put in originally for 100.
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd agree with this.
I live in Aspen and deal with high end residences. Most of our clients have high end stereo and theater systems with a web based control system. There are touch screens in every room that handle music, tv, lights, window shades and many other things. They don't generate a whole lot of traffic on the network, but they're there.
Some also have music servers that run a cu
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:3)
SO Gigabit is coming. Besides, if you make sure that the cable can handle the punch now you can just upgrade you gear later. And 1 Gb Switches can handle 100 MBps cards so you can then upgrade in pieces.
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you compress it, you can fit a ~VHS quality signal in 1 megabit (color or black&white?)
250Kbit is about the highest quality MP3's that I've seen, so if you throw in a handfull of those and your security cameras, you've still got 80-90 megabits left over for 'regular' networking.
80megabits is about 10megabytes/second sustained... That's not much worse you'll get (real life) fr
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets face it, faster is better. If I could copy a whole DVD in a minute, I'd still prefer the solution the let me copy it in a second.
TW
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
6 minutes to transfer a 4GB CD (after adding overhead) seems just fine to me. If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.
About the only reason I can see for wanting to go gigabit in a house is if your whole family is doing remote video editing, and you've got a nice, 10-spindle RAID box to do the file serving.
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:3, Informative)
But wouldn't 2 minutes be better?
On a related note, why do 40x CD-burners exist when 12x would be fine?
If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.
Bull. 100Mbit maxes out at about 9MB of data per second at best (and that assumes no extra overhead, like encryption). Even reading from a standard hard drive you can transfer (both read and write) in at least the low 20MBs range
It is right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Then of course for smaller files there's the seek times, you don't get anything like the maximum theoretical throughput from the drive. As to waiting for 1/4 of the time, it depends whether it's 0.01s or 60s.
Re:It is right. (Score:4, Informative)
Really doesn't make a difference on files less than 10 megs in size, but when you start moving around the nine 2G files that make up a virtual machine (VMware) so you can burn them to DVD all of a sudden you are looking at a 3x increase in throughput (my drives can read at about 35M/s, can write at about 30M/s so my throughput would be capped at 30M/s) means moving these files in 10 minutes instead of half an hour - lets say I am already looking into GigE for the house.
You are right, hard drives can't move the data fast enough to take advantage of the entire pipe - but since hard drives are 3x faster than 100Mb network hardware (and the new SATA RAID setups (which I don't have (yet)) have been clocked at about 8x faster than 100Mb/s network throughput) you will see a significant increase in things that are network limited.
GigE won't make your network 10x faster in reality, but if you spend a lot of time waiting on network transfers of massive files it will make it 3x (to 8x) faster. It really won't help anything that doesn't already saturate the pipe (ie : VOIP, surfing the net, ping times, latency, network games, streaming DVD quality audio or video.)
How fast are your disks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that reading or writing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Test it on your system:
Reading:
dd of=/dev/null if=/tmp/file bs=64k count=131072
Writing:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/file bs=64k count=131072
You should try it with different count values to see how your filesystem buffer affects the speed. Every file you read has to be written somewhere (unless streaming video for instance) and when you have very large files (e.g. 4Gb) your filesystem buffer will be flu
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, what if he wants to have a fast backup solution? With the sizes of hard drives these days, you can use all the transfer speed you can get. Let's say he has a server with enough space to maintain a full backup of his 120 Gig drive on his workstation. Using gigabit ethernet, it will take a theoretical minimum of 17 minutes to transfer all of the data. With 100mb ethernet, it'll take a minimum of 2 hours and 50 minutes. That's an extreme example, but you know, it'll shave off a few seconds here and there during normal use. It all adds up at the end of the day.
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Multiple HD Streams
An broadcast quality 1080i stream is 19.8Mbit/s. If you figure the max you can get out of 100Mbit/s ethernet is 85%-90% , and you want more than 4 streams (yea, sounds outlandish now, but in 5 years it might not seem so weird). Plus standard network traffic (if you dont make seperate networks) and you're looking at gigabit ethernet.
That's fine. I'll upgrade to Gbit in 5 years. (Score:3, Informative)
Till then, the only time my 100mbit LAN gets remotely taxed is when I run Bacula backups of all of my machines.
Three words: Almost zero content (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Three words: Almost zero content (Score:3, Informative)
I've considered gigabit Ethernet for HD streaming too -- I mostly get smooth playback over my 100Mbps network, but occasionally there's a little glitch when the player app moves to the next file, which doesn't happen when playing from the local disk. H
Re:Three words: Almost zero content (Score:3, Insightful)
Geez what do you want. There is more programming available in HD now, than there was OTA programming 20 years ago.
Re:What kind of distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, 100Mbit should be plenty for that.
Watching a raw DVD file served from my OpenBSD Samba server, uses about 7Mbit. That's not to say that other DVD's won't require more though, but certainly not 100Mbit, let alone 1Gbit.
In your house? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard as I try, I can't imagine ever having enough stuff in my house to warrant gigabit. Damn.
Re:In your house? (Score:3, Insightful)
TW
Re:In your house? (Score:2)
Re:In your house? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, given that I'm talking about potentially moving around hundreds of single files in the ~4GB/file range, d'ya think Gbit is even a little justified?
Incidently, for the topic: All Gbit hardware auto-detects crossover, so I just built my backbone network by putting two cards in each of my fileservers and establishing routing between each host. Since Gbit switches are either too cheap to do jumbo frames, or cost more than I want to spend, that's an acceptable workaround. Each machine also has a link to one of the VLANs used by my "client" PCs on the plain old 100mbit network.
Re:In your house? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In your house? (Score:5, Funny)
So there!
Re:In your house? (Score:4, Funny)
That's not Yotta Bytes, but it's still a Lotta Bytes.
Re:Nope. Your disks can't keep up. (Score:3, Informative)
We're talking about ~40MB/sec in ideal conditions, and that's something most modern ATA drives can tolerate reasonably well. I use Samsung SP1614Ns for most of my storage, which can transfer 33MB/s - 57MB/s (inner/outer zone) and handle 40MB/sec across around 70% of the each disk.
So most of the ti
Re:In your house? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now when Gigabit NICs are like 10$ or even integrated on motherboards, why not?
What intrests me is, what is the real speed of (home) Gigabit Ethernet, and when (or if) it could be used for diskless computers. I mean, theoretical speed should be around 100MBps, and even newest hard drives are slower than that.
Would it be possible to use one computer as a SAN for other diskless workstations?
Re:In your house? (Score:5, Interesting)
I love this idea. I've thought about it for a while and I think it could be good stuff. Unfortunately, there is no standard protocol for using a network card as a block device. NFS is ok but try booting your Windows box over NFS. There needs to be a protocol similar to i-scsi that allows you to route disk io over an ethernet card on the hardware level but that is cheap and capable of simultaneously acting as an ethernet card for the OS/s networking. Then you could buy a nice huge high speed raid 5 array and use it for disk in all your machines instead of the little cheap slow unreliable things that machines usually have inside them.
Re:In your house? (Score:4, Interesting)
Look at HyperSCSI (covered on Slashdot here [slashdot.org]).
Problems with 1000BaseTX in same net as 100BaseTX (Score:2, Informative)
Nick Powers
Re:Problems with 1000BaseTX in same net as 100Base (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Problems with 1000BaseTX in same net as 100Base (Score:3, Informative)
Even if you could shovel your data back and forth (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude that is like trying to use jet fuel in a 1984 Capri.
Exactly (Score:2)
Re:Even if you could shovel your data back and for (Score:5, Informative)
Gigabit Ethernet is faster than what your typical ATA drive will absorb, but it is still going to be quite a bit faster than 100BaseT.
Spend the Money on a nicer HDD or a decent RAID setup and you will be able to make full use of a Gigabit pipe.
Re:not according to the demo on the Screen Savers (Score:5, Informative)
The nice thing about GbE is that you can still use your old CAT5 (if it isn't too low quality).
If you buy new cables, you should get CAT5e - basically the same as CAT5, but tested for 125MHz, while CAT5 is only tested for 100MHz. (GBe combines 4 bi-directional wire-pairs with 125MHz each to achieve 1000 Mb/s)
Mac OS X and Gigabit with Jumbo Frames (Score:5, Informative)
A: Some clients have nice network hardware, but legacy copper
B: Some clients have gig copper, but not enough hardware
I can't wait to see the transfer rates on Gig with Jumbo packets though. *Drool*
My experience has been plug and play (Score:5, Informative)
Everything was autodetected and the speed improvement over 100mbit was dramatic. Highest performance increase I've ever gotten for doing basically zero work (I did plug in the cables all by myself
Now, this obviously doesn't answer all your questions, but for anyone out there who doesn't have legacy issues all I can say is go for it, it's a no-brainer.
BTW, I use a Linksys WAP-Router for internet. It didn't so much as burp when we plugged it into the gigabit switch.
TW
I think you need it built onto the motherboard... (Score:5, Informative)
To really take advantage, you're going to need machines that run the network card off the Northbridge. Presumably, PCI-Express network cards will also keep up pretty easily. From what I can see, you're probably best to wait another year to eighteen months before upgrading; by then, PCI-X should be pretty common, and gigabit networking shouldn't be very expensive.
Note that I don't have any direct experience with gigabit: these are just back-of-the-envelope calculations. I could be completely off, so pay attention to replies.
Which is why Gigabit doesn't fit the home (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Which is why Gigabit doesn't fit the home (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though I would probably only get double the speed (disk bottlenecks, one is a slow system) I still am thinking it might be worth it.
Re:I think you need it built onto the motherboard. (Score:5, Informative)
Intel CSA attached gigabit chips (on Intel chipset motherboards only) perform better. CSA is a dedicated link from the northbridge to a gigE controller.
Of course, nForce3 250Gb integrates gigE inside, and gets over 800Mbps performance. See the preceeding
Also, PCI-X != PCIe. PCIe (PCI Express) is the upcoming high speed serial version of PCI that operates on a point-to-point basis. PCI-X is the extended faster variant of 64-bit 66MHz PCI running at up to 133MHz (1GB/s PCI essentially) in a bus configuration.
Re:I think you need it built onto the motherboard. (Score:5, Informative)
once you get around the IDE or SATA, the audio, the USB2 or Firewire (if we're talking video editing) etc etc etc, you would be better adding another standard network card and teaming them for your major data stores in the network and leave everything else as it is.
Also on a side note a 1 X PCI Express slot is ~250MB in each direction (about ~500MB total) so yes a 1 X PCI-E slot will do Gb ethernet fine
Anything 100Mbps ... (Score:3, Insightful)
(Or, a good location for the ceiling is "anywhere above your head").
Re:I think you need it built onto the motherboard. (Score:5, Informative)
Dell PowerConnect (Score:5, Interesting)
For clients I use Intel gigabit cards (the 64-bit PCI "server" model). I wouldn't skimp here since indications are that cheap gigabit cards don't have any hope of getting wire speed. NFS file copies max out at 20-30MB/sec, but I know that is limited by my server's disk array. I did a test for raw network bandwidth (just sending zero bytes as fast as possible) and got around 60-80MB/sec.
Everything is connected to my existing Cat-5 cable with no problems. This includes several Linux systems, one Mac and one Windows PC.
I will caution you not to expect anything like gigabit wire speeds with typical clients. My Mac G4 in particular seems to have trouble getting good bandwidth (I think the problem is either the network stack or NFS client).
If anyone has a success story with jumbo frames, I'd love to hear about it. The only references I could find are for mega-dollar Cisco/Foundry type equipment.
Re:Dell PowerConnect (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dell PowerConnect (Score:5, Informative)
The difference with Gig-E is that it uses all four pairs in the wire (100Mbit only uses 2 pairs) and it has a different linecode that allows more bits per baud.
Before everyone knocks the poster (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before everyone knocks the poster (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Before everyone knocks the poster (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Before everyone knocks the poster (Score:3, Informative)
Sales people are generally clueless.
It seems like almost every time I'm standing around in the computer department looking at networking hardware, a clueless customer is asking a clueless sales guy about stuff. The sales guy will say something stupid, and I'll correct him. Then I'll help the clueless customer save a bunch of cash, helping him with what he needs, rather than what they wanted to sell him.
Who cares if he didn't spend a bunch of cash. He's a *HAPPY* customer now, knowing he got th
Re:Before everyone knocks the poster (Score:3, Insightful)
That salesdude isn't making a penny for talking about NICs. Salesmen there sell computers and service contracts for money.
What generally ends up happening is you bring a customer to the front of the store with his computer and help them out to the car if needed.
Unfortunately, the trip back to the computer area can take as long as 30 minutes. Morons want a salesmen in a computer store to design a network. Bored consultants or lonely old people want someone to
Gigabit in my home (Score:5, Informative)
I have 3com gigabit cards in three computers and a 3com 100Mb card in one.
One gigabit machine is a redhat 8 machine that is used as the network attached storage (NAS) box feeding media throughout the house and acting as the DNS for the house (This is so much faster than relying on your ISP!) and to filter packets for the kids computer (Damn Pr0N!)
One gigabit machine is my personal desktop.
One gigabit machine is in the family room sucking media from the NAS.
The 100MB machine is upstairs and the kids use that one.
The gigabit machines are plugged into a LanReady gigabit switch that I bought for 60 bucks Ebay.
The 100MB machine is plugged into a 3com superstack.
Both switches are then plugged into the cable router.
Speeds between the gigabit machines average 50 Meg a second depending how large the files are and if it's streaming or copying, The 100Mb box pulls 7-8 MB a sec from the others.
I'm happy with the speed.
You don't need gigabit (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you get a very hot, brand new PC with motherboard integrated gigE, your PCI bus can't push the bandwidth. The same goes for switches. You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.
Even if you have a $5000 gigE switch and a PC that can handle it, what are you going to talk to, your cable modem? The only place gigabit ethernet makes sense is when you are aggregating traffic from multiple computers to a centralized server or set of servers, and are using applications that actually require that kind of bandwidth. Even if you want to move that much data around, and have a way to do it (hint - neither scp nor samba can talk that fast), the best benefit you'll see is about double the performance you get with 100.
Here in the networking world (where I live and play), recent advances in traffic management systems have begun to punch holes in the time-worn theory that throwing bandwidth at a network problem = fixed. If you really want network performance, go check out the Linux advanced router/ traffic control site. (lartc.org) There, you'll learn to get lightning response from ssh and your first person shooters, all while running a 2gig/month web server through your home dsl's 256K uplink. And it won't cost you a dime.
Re:You don't need gigabit (Score:5, Insightful)
40MB is a hell of a lot better than 10MB. I don't know why everyone keeps saying he won't be able to saturate the line. He doesn't need to max it out in order to enjoy the benefits over 100Mb ethernet. Who knows what kind data we will be dealing with in 5 years? Seems like going 1000 is a smart investment.
I had no idea Gb Ethernet switches had dropped so much in price. If I was buying a new switch today I'd definitely be buying one of those $100 Linksys switches. Considering the cost is so cheap why even bother with 100MB if you think you'll be using bandwidth hungry apps?
Re:You don't need gigabit (Score:3, Informative)
The caveat here as I might have hinted in my question is that you might get what you pay for. To the point, the Linksys EG008W workgroup gigabit switch won't do jumbo frames and between two 64-bit/66MHz gigabit XP servers (one with an In
Re:You don't need gigabit (Score:5, Insightful)
Being integrated with the motherboard doesn't make a performance difference on any board I've ever seen. It still goes over the PCI bus, it's just not using a slot. Creating a separate bus just for the ethernet port would be too expensive.
I'd be interested to know where you came up with that. Some switches may have an underpowered backplane that limits your aggregate bandwidth (such that you can't pump a full 1Gbps on all ports simultaneously) but it shouldn't prevent you pushing 1Gbps between two ports when all else is idle. If it's advertised as a gigabit switch but is only capable of 400 Mbps, wouldn't the manufacturer be open to claims of false advertising?
Re:You don't need gigabit (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just point out that 400mbps is 4x the speed of 100mbit. That's not a small difference. Seems worth the tiny price premium.
This is a home network we are talking about. Latency, routing and prioritization isn't really an issue. Usually only 1 or 2 things will be going on at a time. What will be noticed is raw bandwidth during large file transfers. I have a gigabit network here. It's very noticeable..
Re:You don't need gigabit (Score:5, Informative)
That axiom is funny, useful, and false. It's used to explain that when you eliminate one bottleneck, your speed will still be limited by other factors.
The concept of a bottleneck is not that without it you have unlimited speed. The concept is a single point that is significantly slower than the rest of the system and therefore the limiting factor for speed. I would argue that a system with a disk that can transfer at 25 mb/s, a motherboard that can transfer at 25mb/s, a network that can transfer at 25mb/s and a receiving computer that can ingest at 25 mb/s doesn't have a bottleneck. That same system with a network capable of 8 mb/s does. Swap out the network with a faster one and there is no bottleneck in the system.
A bottleneck isn't simply something that has a speed limitation. It's a limiting factor in a system that, without that limitation, would have the potential for significantly increased speed. The axiom holds up well in a corperate environment though where the systems are way to complicated for the speeds of everything to be equal and therefore be without bottlenecks.
I'm not saying gigabit is for everyone. It obviously isn't. You need a computer setup that is fast enough and has gigabit networking and you need an application you use where you would notice a difference. These days those things aren't rare though and to pretend it is is to stick your head in the sand. 100 mbit will be plenty fast enough for most people for a long time. gigabit is coming though. Be ready.
It's your money
Actually, it's Netgears. They've had it for a while. I'm happy with my purchase.
Another reason to buy gigabit is if you are planning ahead. An 8 port 10mbit switch isn't very useful today. It won't be too long before a new 100 mbit switch will be the thing you pull out as a last resort when you run out of the fast ones. If you are going to get a desktop switch, you might as well make it gigabit.
My friend has Gigabit (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, wait....
Gigabit (Score:5, Informative)
The one thing I can say is that you'll probably never use it. There's really no need at this time. most protocols aren't any good at sucking up that much bandwidth on a single stream.
I've had many people prove this to me. They'll transfer files as single transfers. They can use up to about 10Mb/s. But if they transfer lots of files, they can use lots more. Try it through a switch that you can monitor bandwidth on. Through FTP, SMB, SCP, or whatever, you won't use up 100Mb/s. But, running multiple concurrent sessions, you can try to come close.
Heroinewarrior has a library called "firehose", which uses up all the available bandwidth, and will stripe across multiple connections to use up more. So, if you have 3 100Mb/s cards in a machine, you can come close to transfering at 300Mb/s.
You should also consider the other factors. Can your machine really send that fast? Is your hard drive fast enough to send over 100Mb/s ?? A nice fast SCSI drive, or a SATA drive can do it, but most IDE drives will fall short (specs be damned, try it in real life).
I transfer stuff around on the GigE lan all the time. We do exceed 100Mb/s, but it's usually with multiple machines.
The highest bandwidth usage machines we have are voyeurweb.com . They send out 150Mb/s through TEQL (Linux kernel option) combined 100baseTX cards, with several copies of thttpd running.
thttpd is a web server that is very small, and works very efficently. Apache has one process per connection, but thttpd has one process for everyone. Well, at least theoretically. It was around 80Mb/s of regular web site files, that it started flaking out. So, we run 4 copies of it on seperate IP's and let it scream.
As for our network, I'll outline our largest network.
We have a 1Gb/s uplink to Level3. This goes to a Cisco Catalyst 3508 (8 GBIC ports).
The remaining 7 GBIC ports go to 7 switches, mostly Cisco Catalyst 3550-48 (48 100Mb/s ethernet, 2 GBIC), and the servers are attached to the 100Mb/s ports. We have one Dell switch, which does 1000baseTX on all the ports, and a few machines with 1000baseTX cards. They can't pull anything resembling 1000Mb/s between each other. it simply doesn't happen. Honestly, doing transfers through http, ftp, or scp doesn't ever use over 100Mb/s on individual transfers. Sure, we can do it with multiple concurrent transfers, but at home, how many hundred or thousand users are you really trying to supply?
For home, you'll never use it. 100Mb/s is usually overkill. I set up my house with 802.11b, and at 11Mb/s peak, I see no difference than my old house, where we had copper run to every room and a Catalyst 2924 managing it. 11Mb/s is more than sufficent for a home network.
Spend your money on a *GOOD* 100Mb/s switch. I highly recommend Cisco, like a 2924, which you should be able to get relatively cheap used. Even if you put GigE cards in the machines, you can at least monitor your bandwidth now, and see what you really use. If you start flat-lining at 100Mb/s (bandwidth graphs make things really obvious), then you could consider upgrading.
Re:Gigabit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gigabit (Score:3, Interesting)
Through some connections several years ago, Igor hooked up with us. We used to just run small porn sites, but then Igor hooked up with us to do Watchcams.com (rest in peace).
I'm trying to make the clear distinction that we didn't "buy" Voyeurweb. There was a rumor about that for a while. It's still Igor's. We (well, my bosses) made a partnership with him, but he never lost control over what goes on the sit
Re:Gigabit (Score:4, Informative)
This guy didn't say he was transfering CD images daily.
You'll see a *HUGE* difference between trying to transfer a CD image on a 100baseT hubbed LAN, and a 100baseTX switched LAN.
Take my office for example.
Transfering a 300MB file from a Linux server to a Windows workstation through a hub takes several minutes.
Transfering the same file on a switched LAN between two 100baseTX connected machines takes a small fraction of that time.
Transfering the same file on the same switched LAN between two 1000baseTX connected machines takes the same as the 100baseTX machines.
Your protocol more than likely isn't going to saturate 100Mb/s. If someone does a transfer like this, sometimes I'll pull up the bandwidth graphs. They'll almost never use up 100Mb/s doing it. Doing 10 simultaniously may.
But the question is, what's he trying to do? His statement was asking about doing it at home, just to do it, and I say "don't bother".
Someone at my office got a new Mac with a 1000baseTX card. They wanted to know about upgrading the LAN to support it. I asked him what he was really trying to do. Browse the Internet, and send 10 to 15Mb worth of files at a time. Nope, it's not worth it.
But sure, if you have money to burn, put GigE fiber between all your workstations, and then you can be all impressed with yourself every time you look at what you've done. You can brag to your friends "I spent $10k on my LAN" Why? Your bandwidth still peaks well under 100Mb/s.
According to the original story, "I've had a whole-house audio/video distribution project on the back-burner for a while now". He's looking to stream audio and video between computers in his house. Does he need 1000baseTX? No. He can get away with 1Mb/s or less between machines. So if he has 10 workstations simultaniously streaming, he may saturate at 10Mb network, 100Mb is fine for him. A switched 100baseTX network is ideal.
What you're probably encountering at 100base is the limitation of what your computer can send, or some crappy hardware on your LAN. Ya, that SMC hub isn't state of the art. Spend a few bucks on a good switch before you say "We should convert to GigE". Sure as hell I wouldn't recommend running it on that Linksys "workgroup switch". Ya, that's a bright solution for improving your network. Maybe if you're upgrading from a SMC hub, or one the no-name specials..
But hey, you probably also spent the few hundred bucks more for a Cyrix 6x86 PR233, and were screaming how great it was. "My Cyrix is so much faster than your Intel P200, who cares if it crashes all the time"
Firewire...as a nearby alternative. (Score:2, Insightful)
SMC Gigabit (Score:5, Informative)
Why should you care about jumbo frames? I found this nice guide about that here. [wareonearth.com]
GigE Switch, NIC, and Jumbo Frames (Score:3, Informative)
I say go for it! (Score:5, Interesting)
A warning though, I've heard most of the cheap gigabit switches have fans in them. Fans reduce the reliability of a switch many fold and make them LOUD. I like my 4 port Netgear and they now make an 8 port version which is also fanless and very reasonably priced.
Does anyone have a Linksys or D-Link gigabit switch who can confirm or deny the presence of a fan?
One note I'd like to throw in: Gigabit ethernet requires Cat-5 cable. Not Cat-5e, Not Cat-6, Cat-5. Better cables may be less prone to issues but they aren't part of the gigabit ethernet standard so don't go out and re-cable your house just for a little Gig-E.
Re:I say go for it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I say go for it! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I say go for it! (Score:3, Interesting)
Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Web100 project (Score:5, Interesting)
As for fragmenting down, it might be easier to do that with a router that you actually have software control over (i.e. an old, low power linux box). I don't really have any experience with this on a home network, so...
Sujal
It's not as straightforward as it sounds... (Score:5, Interesting)
Like me you'll probably find you don't get a 10x increase in speed, but maybe 25-50%, like from 8 MB/s to 13 MB/s when you transfer stuff between two computers.
This is because your hard drive is fragmented, and this will completely, and drastically affect performance when you copy stuff. You don't realize it, but you will take a massive hit when you try to copy your isos, movies, etc across the LAN.
I went from 13 MB/s to like 30 MB/s after i defragmented my source and destination drives.
The main thing is that with Gigabit Ethernet, you have to think of the entire network as a system that works completely together. There has to be a complete unity between all components on your network because you will see the bottlenecks a lot easier.
Also, none of the netgear cheap stuff support jumbo frames. The more expensive NICs do, but the gs10X ports do *not* support jumboframes.
As well, they get really, really, really hot. Unnecessarily hot if you ask me, like burning to the touch, and could really heat up the inside of your CPU. In fact, even the gs105 switch is hot to the touch, too.
I instead bought 2 Intel Pro 1000 MTs. They are much more reliable, they do support jumbo frames (but I can't use it until I actually get a jumob frame compatible switch) and they don't get hot at all.
Why not go for firewire? (Score:3, Interesting)
My experience in upgrading to gigabit (Score:5, Informative)
For a switch I went with an 8 port SMC EZSwitch 8508T [smc.com]. I chose it since:
1. It supports jumbo frames. According to my testing it will pass ethernet packets up to 9212 bytes which should correspond to a 9198 byte MTU.
2. It doesn't have a cooling fan. A definate plus since in my experience the little fans in switches such as this can become quite annoying as they age.
3. It comes with rack mount ears.
4. It's affordable. I purchased it from Securemart.com [securemart.com] for $139.31 shipped. Ordered it Thursday or Friday, it arrived Monday or Tuesday.
As to NICs, one of my PCs already had an Intel gigabit port on the motherboard. In addition I purchased 4 more Intel Pro 1000/MT Desktop Adapters [intel.com]. Since:
1. They have good driver support on both Linux and Windows.
2. They support jumbo frames. Supposedly up to around 16000 bytes.
3. They're supposed to be pretty fast/efficient. It's kind of dated but you can find a comparison of some 32-bit gigabit NICs here [digit-life.com].
4. They'll do 66Mhz if your motherboard supports it and of my systems does.
5. They have DOS NDIS2 drivers so I can use Ghost to make/restore images over the network.
One I purchased through Intel's evaluation program [ententeweb.com] for $35.31 shipped. As I recall it took over a week to show up. The other three I ordered from OnlineMicro [onlinemicro.com] for $28 each plus $11.32 shipping. Be sure to change the shipping option from ground to 2 day air if you order more than 1, it's cheaper. They shipped them out the day of my order and they arrived on time.
One of the Intel NICs died about 4 hours after I installed it. I swapped it with another and the replacement has been working fine for a few weeks now. I ran the diagnostics on it and other all but the link test passed. When the OS is booted up the switch shows no link lights but sometimes when the PC is off the link lights do come on. I've also tried it in another PC where it exhibits similar symptoms. I haven't yet contacted Intel about getting it replaced.
I spent a lot of time tweaking various things. Some findings:
1. With default SO_RCVBUF sizes a MTU in the neighborhood of 4000 or so bytes seems to get about the best network/application wide throughput. Specifically the otherwise fast NF7-S system below would lose almost 50% throughput with 9000 byte MTUs with the default SO_RCVBUF size. Linux to Linux lost around 30% as I recall.
In theory you can change the default SO_RCVBUF size on linux by echoing appropriate values to:
Other than that you appear to have to change this setting in each individual application. One application of note that allows you to easily make this change is samba. See your:
2. If you crank the SO_RCVBUF size up to 200ish k or more then a 9000ish byte MTU can eek out another 5ish percent more bandwidth. Thus for the moment I've decided to just stick with 4076.
3. MTUs that are not of a size of the form 8x+4 cause Linux to behave oddly when it performs path MTU discovery. Namely for jumbo sizes that don't fit that form the discovery decides that the PMTU is 1492. You can read more detail about it in a Usenet post I made here [google.com]. I still don't have a good picture of what'
Several points ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, the speed depends of course mainly on what the two sides of the connection are capable of in read speed (from disk) and write speed (to disk). If you copy files from A to B and one side is only using a cheap-ass 10 MB/s hard disk, you won't get anywhere near the theoretical maximum network speed.
I have a LAN here with my main machine being a machine with Intel CSA, and then there are three other machines - two with a PCI GBit card and one with a motherboard-integrated PCI 3com NIC. Depending on which machine copies to which machine, I get transfer speeds of 30 MB/s (copying to my old Celeron PC) to about 70 MB/s (the last only when I copy files from a machine with a fast hard drive to my main machine, which is using the CSA GBit and the SATA stripe set, which is also using a separate bus away from PCI - in this case the network speed seems to be limited by the read speed of the other machine).
So I would say that right now the home GBit is limited mainly a.) by the combined speed of hard disk and PCI GBit card being smaller than 133MB/s in the case of a machine with a PCI network card and b.) the hard disk read/write speed being slower than the max GBit speed in the case of a machine with CSA GBit. I would guess that if I had a second machine like my fastest one (both hard disk and GBit away from PCI and the hard disk stripe set being able of read/write speed greater than 100MB/s) I would finally be in GBit heaven
As far as components go - look, as was said, for the motherboard integrated, non-PCI solutions if you buy a new PC. If you're upgrading an old PC, PCI cards are OK - they are a DEFINITE improvement over 100MBit cards, even if you just read 30MB/s. As for the switch - don't buy the cheapest one, the Realtek chips (they're the ones most likely using in there) seem to have some real issues. Also, if you are noise sensitive, look for one without a fan, those little buggers can get pretty annoying real soon. I bought a 3com 5 port 10/100/1000 switch for (half a year ago) 150 Euros, and I'll probably stick another one on top of it pretty soon. That thing (3C1670500) is small, has no fan and simply does what you want it to do. And it's pretty cheap for a brand name product. And all the components which don't use GBit (like the print server, the DSL router and the Access Point) I simply left on the old 100MBit switch, so the five ports limitation wasn't really one.
Ok, on jumbo frames... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't worry about them. Only very, very expensive systems will be able to take advantage of them.
If you have 32/33 pci, you arent going to get max throughput from GbE anyway. I've managed to get around 90mbyte/sec using ttcp, which is about 750mbit/s.
Because the hardware does all the work for you (hardware checksum, interrupt mitigation, etc). the cpu usage is very low even at that rate. And thanks to polling, the interrupt rate isnt an issue either.
Your bottleneck will be your PCI bus, plain and simple. You arent going to get the full 132mbyte/s from 32/33 pci, period.
Unfortunately 64bit/66mhz PCI motherboards are somewhat expensive and 64/66 cards are 3-4x the cost of 32/33 ones.
You CAN'T fragment jumbo frames on the same lan (Score:3, Informative)
If you have legacy 10/100 devices that are plugged into that segment, jumbo gigE frames will NEVER work with the legacy devices. gigE frames appear to be L2 MAC errors as the preamble, source, destination, length addressing may line up in the front of the frame, but the crc at the rear will never line up. (Ethernet II frame illustrated below)
Preamble|Source MAC|Destination MAC|length|data|CRC
This is exactly like MTU's not lining up.
But anyways, I think there are demonstrations with some workloads saturating a gigE w/o using jumbo frames.
[snip] from http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/overhead/
Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo Frames
Gigabit ethernet is exactly 10 times faster than 100 Mbps ethernet, so for standard 1500 byte frames, the numbers above all apply, multiplied by 10. Many GigE devices however allow "jumbo frames" larger than 1500 bytes. The most common figure being 9000 bytes. For 9000 byte jumbo frames, potential GigE throughput becomes (from Bill Fink, the author of nuttcp):
Hardware I use... (Score:5, Informative)
Switch:
Linksys Instant Gigabit 10/100/1000 8-port switch [linksys.com]
I think I paid ~$200 for this.
Cards:
Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop Adapter [intel.com] (~$50 ea)
Use the e1000 driver in 2.4.x or 2.6.x.
Netgear GA302T Copper Gigabit Adapter [netgear.com] (~50 ea)
Use the tg3 driver in 2.4.x or 2.6.x
The tg3 chipset runs rather hot, the e1000 is tiny and runs cool. I havent noticed a performance difference between either, and both chipsets run fine regardless of whatever PC I put them in.
Motherboards with embedded GbE typically use e1000 (if theyre good), or realtek (if theyre cheap).
Jumbo frames:
See my post on that here [slashdot.org].
Cabling:
Hand crimped cat5e. Works fine. One interesting note about GbE, you no longer have to worry about crossover cables -- the GbE spec requires that devices autodetect crossover. You can make all your GbE cables "straight through" cables.
Do pay careful attention to following strict T568 wiring code though. You can no longer get away with incorrectly wired cables which just happened to work for 100bt. Since all pairs are now used in GbE, your wiring order must be 100% spec.
Here's some wiring guides:
http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5E.asp
Re:Shouldn't it be 1024? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shouldn't it be 1024? (Score:2)
Your elementary school math teacher must be very upset right now!
Re:Shouldn't it be 1024? (Score:2)
WRONG! (Score:3, Interesting)
When refering to any type of computer storage: giga = 2^10.
This is mostly because computer storage is addressed by a processor in some way and processor registers happen to be binary storage devices.
You can't build a 1000 byte RAM chip and expect to address it without doing a calculation to distinguish a valid address from an invalid one.
A 1024 byte RAM chip makes it simple. Just connect 10 address pins to it and any combination is valid.
Networks don't use the 2^10 convention
Re:Look closely at the hardware, too! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Look closely at the hardware, too! (Score:3, Informative)
Huh? What bytes are these?
% units -v 33Mhz*32bit megabit/second
33Mhz*32bit = 1056 megabit/second
% units -v 33Mhz*32bit megabyte/second
33Mhz*32bit = 132 megabytes/second