PCI Ethernet Card With Five or Six Ports

[Will]

I have an old firewall that is out of segments and has no additional slots
available. As a short-term fix, I would like to identify is there a make
and model or PCI ethernet card that supports five or more ports on the card?
We are already using four port cards.

[Rick Jones]

Post by Will
I have an old firewall that is out of segments and has no additional
slots available. As a short-term fix, I would like to identify is
there a make and model or PCI ethernet card that supports five or
more ports on the card? We are already using four port cards.

While I cannot claim to have had a finger consistently on the pulse of
the Ethernet market, I'm pretty sure that four was the limit. Much
more than four ports and things might have started to get pretty tight
on the bulkhead.

Do you need physical ports, or could you start subdividing existing
physical ports with tagged VLANs? Or is the firewall too old for
that?

rick jones

[Will]

Post by Rick Jones
Do you need physical ports, or could you start subdividing existing
physical ports with tagged VLANs? Or is the firewall too old for
that?

VLANs are usually a hassle to configure, maintain, document, and there is
always the risk that someone did them wrong and you don't have the security
of separation you thought you had. I've also seen switches with bugs that
allow traffic to cross VLANs unintentionally.

[Manfred Kwiatkowski]

Post by Will

Post by Rick Jones
Do you need physical ports, or could you start subdividing existing
physical ports with tagged VLANs? Or is the firewall too old for
that?

VLANs are usually a hassle to configure, maintain, document, and there is
always the risk that someone did them wrong and you don't have the security
of separation you thought you had. I've also seen switches with bugs that
allow traffic to cross VLANs unintentionally.

A switch acting as a fanout of untagged ports is conceptually the
same as a multiport ethernet card. On the front you get seperated
ethernets an on the rear there runs some multiplexing software between
the cpu and some firmware you cannot check to 100%. It is just
an external ethernet card, that runs dot1q instead of a proprietary
protocol or e.g USB. BTW have you considered an USB-Ethernet
adapter if you put more confidence in that...?