Once upon a time, we had a machine that wound up with a default routethat pointed straight to the local network, basically what you'd get ifyou did route add default dev eth0 .

(Disclaimer: I have no idea if your system would actually accept that route command or if it would demand a gateway.)

That this worked to some degree is not too surprising in retrospect;there actually is a straightforward meaning to this, namely to arp for alldestinations on the local Ethernet, and that

We're (still) looking for a new SAN , so I haverecently been doing some work with a homebrew iSCSI testing environmentbuilt from ordinary servers. The experience leaves me with a simplequestion: why does anyone buy special iSCSI accelerator networkcards?

(These are sometimes called 'iSCSI HBA cards'.)

I ask because my ordinary test environment, with commodity server NICsand no tuning besides 9,000 byte jumbo frames, can basically saturategigabit Ethernet doing bulk reads over iSCSI. Through the