[SunRescue] Re: Help!

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, April 19, 2001 at 22:13:27 (-0400), Joshua D. Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Re: Help!
>
> I wish there were an OpenBSD router project...  I'd like a router on a
> floppy for my 486 firewall machine, and OpenBSD would make me feel more
> secure.

I've easily made a "rescue" floppy for NetBSD that'll boot and run just
fine on a 4MB 486 machine.  Turning it into a "router" would only
involve removing a couple of unnecessary programs (to make space) and
adding couple more programs back in, and writing a script or two
(because the full multi-user startup system is far too heavy-weight).

It'd be pretty useless and very hard to manage though.

Why people want it on a floppy is beyond me.  You can't ask for a less
reliable piece of hardware on most machines....

My own gateway box, a wee Pentium-150MHz clone, has a couple of 300MB
IDE drives and even runs snmpd so that I can use Cricket to graph my
usage....  It's quite an awsome little router that I built for about
$100 in parts.

You also can't get enough performance out of a 486 any more for anything
more than a dial-up connection anyway, particularly if you want to do
any serious amount of IP filtering, NAT, etc.  I ran my cable modem
connection on a 486DX2-66 router for a while but it was just too damn
slow, even with the most modern DMA-driven ISA ethernet cards I could
find.  It worked OK, but could never give me full transfer rates.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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