[geeks] # of machines running currently

[Josh Mast]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 04:05:37PM -0500, Joshua D Boyd wrote:
> How do y'all manage to get 486s going as routers?  My experience trying to set
> up my AST as a router was miserable.  I just couldn't get it work work with
> any 2 NICs at once (several off brand NE2ks, and 2 different versions of the
> 3COM 3c509).  After all that hassle I decided to just give up and buy myself a
> second NIC for a SS2, adding it was child's play.

 I just have a ton of 486 era hardware sitting around from days past. I have a
stack of 4-5 Intel & AMD 66mhz chips sitting somewhere.

 My router was just a fluke, one of my old socket3 boards decided to start
shooting itself in the foot (it was a really nice board too, had onboard
PCI and everything), so I threw a chip in this socket3 board that was sitting in
a case I stole from my old workplace, I wasn't even expecting it to work, but it
did. Even better, it actually had jumper settings for the bus speed silkscreened
on the board, so I wound up throwing my AMD 80mhz chip in and jumping the bus
speed up to 40mhz, threw in a crappy ISA IO card and generic ne2k and a 420MB
drive with a fresh install of NetBSD. It runs decently, although I don't have
a need for two NICs in it, just a decent serial port (dialup hell).

-Josh