OpenBSD Journal

[Ask] Fiber interfaces for filtering bridge?

Contributed by Dengue on from the fiber dept.

Tom Carpenter writes : "What suggestions does anyone have for fiber interfaces for setting up a filtering bridge under OpenBSD? I've looked through documentation and the closest thing that I can find to a reccommendation for an interface is in section 11.4 of the OpenBSD FAQ which states:
...Unfortunately, some expensive brand adapters (such as the 3com XL series) are not much better than the cheap adapters. One favourite 10/100Mbps adapter is the Intel EtherExpress PRO/100.
Of course that doesn't directly address my question, but I was considering trying out the Intel PRO/1000F (which looks like the sole fiber interface available from Intel). An interface capable of running at gigabit speeds is more than we need (at the moment), but making the (gross) assumption that things Intel are stable I thought it might be a better bet than just picking something at random."

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward () on

    The wx driver is not all that good right now. Try an sk/ti based NIC, they're very well supported.
    The lge driver based cards (the driver coming with 3.0 and up) is untested and could really use some testing, any feedback provided is quite useful.

  2. By Anonymous Coward () on

    Check black box or any of the multitudes of cable product vendors our there.... you can always get a UTP to MM or SM Fibre... I kinda hate these things, as you will need an external power supply, but you can drive any ethernet card you wish..

    The 10 meg ones are usually cheap.

  3. By Blake Willis () blake at two one one two dot net on www.2112.net

    Do you just need to light some fiber as cheaply as possible, or do you care about speed/quality?

    If you just need to light up some fiber cheaply, go for a media converter such as those available from WizLan . They do multimode 100bFX up to 15km, and single mode to 100km. 100bFX NICs are generally not worth messing around with anymore.

    If you need speed and don't care about price, SysKonnect makes seriously powerful 64 bit 66 mhz PCI GigE cards that reportedly work quite well with OpenBSD ( man sk(8) , though I haven't tested them myself. They're available in SX for multimode fiber and LX (up to 15 km) for single mode. They have dual port cards as well, though they're hella expensive.

  4. By Richard () on http://cat5fetish.net

    I found the eext below when looking at the cryptographic hardware support. Looks like someone definately DOESN'T suggest intel go GigE support.
    Much like Intel does for all their networking division components, and completely unlike most other vendors, Intel steadfastly refuse to provide us with documentation. We have talked to about five technical people who are involved in the development of those products. They all want us to have documentation. They commend us on what we have done. But their hands are tied by management who does not perceive a benefit to themselves for providing documentation. Forget about Intel. (If you want to buy gigabit ethernet hardware, we recommend anything else... for the same reason: most drivers we have for Intel networking hardware were written without documentation).

  5. By Anonymous Coward () on

    I've been using a ti based (Netgear GA620) set of cards, they've been great, in link0 they do vlan en/de-capsulation very well, been using that to open packets, ipf them, then re-encapsulate and send them on their way. Works great

  6. By Andreas Holzinger () a.holzinger@firepower.at on www.firepower.at

    We found that some cards work some don`t. Please do not use cards for transparent filtering with a Realtek chipset! We have had very good results with Intel EtherExpress Pro 100/S. Worked right out of the box as expected. We ran it with Open BSD 2.9 had absolutely no problems. If you need fiber interfaces I would recommend using a fiber to copper adapter. Then you can use every card you like. We used that at a customers site and have the adapters running for nearly two years now without problem.

    I know the Intel Ether Express is a 100 MBit card, but its the best card out there for this kinda job.

    Take care


    Andreas (from the now cold Austria :-)

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