[Soekris] net5501 page is up

[Jan Ceuleers]

Michael Stone wrote:
> Yeah, well, I'm having trouble coming up with examples of networks with 
> jumbo frames that have a data rate low enough to make a geode-based 
> sniffer anything more than a joke.

On production networks you're absolutely right. I'm thinking of labs and 
pre-production field deployments.

My principal application is carrier NGNs. Without jumbo frames, a lot of 
the signalling traffic (particularly SIP) needs to be fragmented. This 
is fairly low-speed traffic that is generally separated from RTP (voice) 
traffic (that is: on separate interfaces). The RTP subnets of course 
have no need for jumbo frames, but the signalling and management subnets 
can benefit from them.

There are generally two ways of probing such networks: use port 
replication on the infrastructure ethernet switches and attach a 
high-performance sniffer to that, or attach passive probes to the 
interfaces of interest. Under circumstances that I can't go into here 
the latter is sometimes preferable to the former.

Cheers, Jan