I wondered about the corssover cable so I talked to a guy at work who 
designs some gigabit stuff.  You don't need a switch and you don't even 
need a crossover cable.  I straight thru cable will work just fine, 
gigabit stuff will do the cross over for you.  Which is interesting 
being that it transmits and receives on all 4 pairs at the same time.

Fun stuff.

Thomas Eibner wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 03:27:58PM -0600, Paul Rech wrote:
> 
>>I need a high speed network connection between 2 database servers on
>>IBM Netfinity servers.
>>What are my options and what hardware do I need?
>>
> 
> I once did something similar, although I just went with 100Mbit between
> the two hosts, that was more than adequate formy purposes.
> 
> 
>>I was looking to gigabit ethernet first, as I figured it would be the
>>cheapest.
>>But a sysadmin I know said he wasn't sure but he thought about $4,000
>>for two cards and a switch.
>>
> 
> What do you want a switch for? (Unless you want to hook more machines
> in later of course).
> 
> 
>>Is it really that much for gigabit hardware?
>>Is gigabit the cheapest alternative?
>>What kind of switch is required?
>>What's the difference between a switch and a hub?
>>What's the actual transfer rate you can achieve?
>>1,000,000,000 bits per sec/ 8bits = 125,000,000 bytes per sec
>>125,000,000 bytes  per sec / reality =~ 20MB/sec I'm guessing.
>>
> 
> Transfer-rate all depends on the hardware.. 
> I've been able to get 800KB/s between 2 10Mbit cards and around 7MB/s 
> between 2 100Mbit cards, and that wasn't even state of the art hardware.
> 
> 


-- 
The more I know, the more I know I don't know.
Confused and confusing since 1966.
If I had a nickle for every time I knew I was
right and spoke up, I could buy a soda, maybe
even two.