Implementing a backbone net for a set of Digital UNIX machines

From: Tonny Madsen <Tonny.Madsen_at_netman.dk>
Date: 27 Jun 1996 13:39:13 +0200

Hi',

We are in the process of implementing a backbone network for our
company, and just before we start doing anything, I would like to hear
if any of you have any comments or ideas...

We have 4 Digital UNIX machines of varying size that serve nearly 50
users (programmers) on PC's running MS Windows and X servers. All
data, including the home directories of the users and sources for all
projects, is distributed among the servers.

We (consequently) have a great deal of NFS traffic between the servers
especially when we compile. In order to lighten the load of the global
company network we want to implement an FDDI backbone network between
the servers.

This will look like the following. Note that we also have printers,
routers, terminal concentrators and all sorts of other equipment on the
10Mb net.

            +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+
            |PC| |PC| |PC| |PC| |PC| |PC| |PC|
            +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+ +--+
             | | | | | | |
10Mb -------------------------------------
               | | |
          +---------+ +---------+ +---------+
          | OSF | | OSF | ... | OSF |
          +---------+ +---------+ +---------+
               | | |
100Mb +----------------------------+


Now, we think we can accomplish what we want by doing the
following.

The servers currently have address' on the form a.b.c.d where 1<=d<=14
and this will be true for a long time yet.

- we make a small subnetwork in our current class C address space
  a.b.c.xx: a.b.c.240-a.b.c.254

- for each of the servers, we configure the new FDDI cards with
  these addresses using

    ifconfig fta0 inet a.b.c.(d+240) netmask 255.255.255.240 metric 0

- for each of the servers, we reconfigure the old ethernet cards by
  adding "metric 10" to the IFCONFIG_0 definition in /etc/rc.config

- for each of the servers, we will start to use the routed daemon
  until we know the new backbone network works as expected. When this
  happens we will probably want to add some static routes (though this
  is not certain)

Have we forgotten anything serious here? Will it work as expected? Any
other comments or ideas?

/tonny
--
Tonny Madsen, NetMan a/s, Vandtaarnsvej 77, DK-2860 Soeborg, Denmark
E-mail: Tonny.Madsen_at_netman.dk
Telephone: +45 39 66 40 20 Fax: +45 39 66 06 75
Received on Thu Jun 27 1996 - 14:23:27 NZST

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