New home wiring installation

[WhiteKnight]

As I discussed in this thread, I'm wiring my new house with ethernet and coax. I have very easy access to all my wiring locations via crawl spaces, so rather than using cat6 I've decided to use up the remainder of my cat5e spool, then upgrade in the future if I feel it's necessary.

My question is regarding my choice of a switch. I'd like to get a gigabit switch, but I'm a bit confused about jumbo frame support. Many folks on here strongly advocate jumbo frame capable hardware, but I'd like to know just how necessary it is. My plan is to have all the drops in the house going to my new switch and I'll use my existing WRT54G as an upstream router and AP. I'm going to be running in a mixed 100/1000 environment, since not all of my old PCs have gigabit NICs, and I just want to figure out if it's worth shelling out the extra money for a switch that supports jumbo frames or if I'm ok with just a regular gigabit switch. Any help is appreciated, thanks!

 

[Madwand1]

IMO, for modern hardware, JF's are not necessary. JF's become more important when you're dealing with PCI NICs, slow CPUs, heavy CPU loads (due to other tasks concurrent with GbE networking), outdated networking hardware, etc. Even with PCI NICs, if all else is good, JFs are only good for the "last mile" -- i.e. the top-end performance -- and to get there, you have to have very fast drives / RAID arrays in the first place, and utilizing them fairly heavily. So IMO, JFs are not worth the trouble in many cases, but there are some cases where they are.

However, I don't think that JF support should cost you much more money -- though it could cost you a bit of effort to find a supporting switch. The Netgear GS108 / GS608 / GS605 all support 9 KB jumbo frames, but only in the v2 version. Search Netgear Support using e.g. "GS108 v2" to see the differences.

 

[WhiteKnight]

Thanks for the reply. The GS108 looks tempting. Too bad it doesn't come with rackmount hardware. At Newegg's price, I could get two GS108s for less than the non-JF 16 port switch I was looking at originally. ( NETGEAR ProSafe JGS516)

 

[Madwand1]

There's also the GS116. It comes with a "wall mounting kit", and there's always the universal rack mounting kit.

 

[WhiteKnight]

The GS116 looks pretty good. I'm sure I can rig up something to get it in my rack. What concerns should I have as far as tweaking frame size for gigabit ethernet vs. frame size for internet via cable/DSL?

 

[Madwand1]

I just set the MTU to 9000 in the registry (and reboot); the adapter to whatever it supports / whatever I want, and let path MTU detection / whatever figure it out.

So far the only (*) problem I've encountered is that I can't access one of my router's web admin page when using a NIC with JF enabled, but this is no show-stopper.

I haven't done anything very sophisticated with this network, but standard internet access, windows networking, file transfers, wireless bridging have all been fine in this setup of mixed wired / wireless, 100/1000 some JF-enabled, some not, some with different max JF sizes.

(*) Well, in one case a switch performed significantly worse with JF enabled, but this was not a Netgear. In other cases, there can be a slight decline with JF usage, but in all, esp. if you have some case which give a big improvement with JF usage, this can be lost in the noise / averaging.

 

[WhiteKnight]

Thanks for the help, Madwand. I decided to go with the GS116. I also found a (relatively) cheap 1U shelf to mount it on.