Brand Name Server With Many Slots

[Will]

Does Dell, Compaq/HP, or IBM make a 4U server that has lots of
slots in the back? I would like at least 10 PCI-66 slots or
better, to build a firewall with a large number of ports. I
intend to fill the box with four port ethernet cards.

 

[j9]

No such puppy. You'd run out of IRQ resources before you'd fill them up,
even with sharing. You'd be better off using a smaller number of NICs and
assigning multiple IPs/VLANs to each physical port.

If you insist on doing this, a better approach would be to use USB NICs.
Theoretically, you could get 127 on each USB controller you installed. I
figure a good PC-99 standard MB will have 6 PCI slots, so you'd get 762 NICs
installed (theoretically, of course -- I've never heard of anybody getting
more than 110 devices working on a USB bus, and far less with multiple USB
controllers).

Better bet would be to get a Cisco or a Juniper to handle this. ASICs are
much more capable of doing MAC matching/translation/ACL chores than an intel
x86 class CPU.

 

[Will]

Is there a straightforward way of telling the switch to move all
traffic from Port X to a port owned by the firewall, and to not
respond to any Mac requests from other ports? What is the name
for this capability?

I don't want to hassle with VLANs as there is too much
configuration work involved, and for a firewall it is way too
error-prone. I'm not thrilled with even having to configure a
switch to connect specific ports to a port attached to the
firewall, but as a worst case I could do it.