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
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...?
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