Ok my routing knowledge is good enough to get me into loads of trouble most of the time. I configure VLAN to VLAN routing in our LAN switches almost daily but with little formal training. We have just setup a couple of HP E3800's in a mess to act as our layer 3 core switches. All other switches will come back to these two in a spanning tree redundant fashion. I'm implementing a second firewall in a cluster to also provide failover, but in the future could be set to provide load balancing. To do this we need to place a switch (that will act like a dumb hub) between the firewalls and out ISP's cisco switch on site.
My boss said (after I exploring some suitable switch options and costs), "it would be great if we could just program a few ports on the L3 core switch to route between the ISP's switch and the external interface of the firewalls".
Little bells sounded off in my head that this might not be a great idea (topped out at a 100Mb connection speed) but the lines between routers and switches are very much blurred this days it seems... Since you can not address ports like you can a router interface, I can't see how this could work?
Is this a terrible idea or doable? And why would I want to do that apart from saving money?
TIA