[SunRescue] Re: Help!

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

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

We don't care if the floppy will fail so easily because the idea is for
the whole system to be loaded to a ram disk.  Thus, the floppy is only
needed on reboots, and we all know the uptime possible with unix like
systems.
 
> 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.

At this time, neither me nor my family have $100 to spare.  Perhaps in a
few months we will, but the security threat to the network is here and
now.
 
> 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.

I'm running a pair of 3c509 cards, which aren't the most modern, but
aren't as bad as ne2k.  I don't expect too much ip filtering on a machine
like this, but, then I'm not a security expert and probably wouldn't know
what to do with it.  

I'll know more once the machine is setup (I spend an hour here and there
poking at it), but initial tests have it saturating a DSL line with bearly
an CPU load.  Previously my biggest concern had been that the ISA bus
would run out of bandwidth.  I can't imagine that NAT would saturate this
machine.  That would mean that the cheap DSL router/hub units that
companies like 3com and linksys sell would have to have more power than a
fairly capable workstation (at this machines peek it have 52 megs of ram
and 10 gigs of harddrive space, and was used as a primary graphics
workstation).

And if I'm wrong about performance, well, I'll have to live with it for at
least several months unless my sister decides to consider linux acceptable
for her computer.



--
Joshua Boyd