RE: [SLUG] LAN

From: Kwan Lowe (kwan@digitalhermit.com)
Date: Tue Oct 18 2005 - 15:24:36 EDT


> Neat ideas! The media stuff sounds a little bandwidth hungry--especially
> when it is competing with your other network services. What speed is your
> network infrastructure and how does it handle the load? Have you discovered
> any ways to use the bandwidth more efficiently?

The network is segmented. Most of the traffic occurs on a switched 100mbit network.
I'm experimenting with a few machines on gigabit cards for backup purposes. E.g., my
main workstation has two NICs. Default route for web, mail, etc.. goes through eth0
through a Linksys firewall/router. Traffic to the fileserver goes through a eth0 on
the gigabit network to the fileserver.

I can move a 1G file in a matter of seconds via the gigabit interface. However, for
the media streams the 100mbit switched network seems more than ample. It can serve
three 1G DivX files without hiccups. It would probably fall over flat if I tried
three copies, but the client player application (either Windows Media Player,
mplayer, xine or the default divX player) seems to either cache the streams locally
or maybe only request a portion of the file at a time. The file server is a very
modest AMD K6/2 500MhZ system with 384M of RAM.

In actual usage I rarely have more than a single DivX playing so bandwidth is rarely
an issue. The busiest file server usage is when updates roll out since they're all
cached on the file server and all boxes are hitting it. The easy solution would be
to stagger the updates (it's a single entry in the root crontab :D ).

-- 
* The Digital Hermit   http://www.digitalhermit.com
* Unix and Linux Solutions   kwan@digitalhermit.com
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