[geeks] NAT and Filtering on Solaris

[Brian Hechinger]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 07:48:18PM -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> 
> It's reliable enough for burns and the modest amont of load I put on it,
> so I'm happy.  But yeah, isn't the Darwin's IDE controller that awful
> CMD640?

yup.

> > toss a SCSI card in it and your opinion of it will go way up. :)
> 
> Done that.  I don't have anything of any value to plug into it.  Right

the IDE performance is very poor.  but as long as you aren't looking to do
disk heavy work and have enough RAM that you don't need to swap often, it
should do just fine with an IDE disk.

> now, my favorite feature of the U10 is that it's just about silent,
> especilly next to the Octane, the I2, and the I2's disc box.

god damn the Octane is loud.  i need to look into higher capacity, quieter
fans for this thing.  although my solution is to just turn the stereo up. ;)

> I'm running it headless until I can afford Elite3D. :)

prepare to be unimpressed.  you *DO* own an Octane after all. ;)

> Really, though, the onboard video isn't that bad.  Except for the framebuffer
> size, it murders CG6/CG3, which is what I've used on every other SPARC.

i haven't used the U5/10 enough to know what it's like.  don't think i ever
will either, so it doesn't much matter. :)

> U2 isn't really low-end, is it?  Granted, they're sbus, but there's a lot
> of muscle-potential in a U2, especially for a deep-dish pizza box.

notice the quotes?  it's low end compared to say a u60 or a 250/450/etc.  not
the low end altogether.  just the lowest i am willing to go.  the ultra2 rocks
as a server, but so far sucks as a workstation (even with a creator3D series 3)
and there is nothing wrong with SBus btw. :)

> All the gurus I've asked have told me that the non-hme FastEthernet
> drivers are only available in Solaris/x86.  This means I either get hme,
> or I find a third-party card by a company that writes their own SunOS
> drivers.  Maybe I'm just paranoid, but putting non-Sun cards in a Sun box
> makes me feel icky.

hmmm.  yeah, i would tend to avoid that.  but it's not so scary as you'd think.
a lot of what sun sells isn't made by then anyway.

> [T3]
>
> I wish.

we all do. ;)

> Seconded.  "Easy" isn't what I'm going for.  Neither is "obtusely
> difficult", but I'll take "interesting" and/or "hackable" over "easy" in a
> heartbeat.  This, of course, is the primary difference between the stuff at home
> and the stuff I deploy at work. :)

hell yeah.  at home, hackable means fun and learning.  easy means nothing.  at
work one can't afford fun and learning as a production environment doesn't have
any room for that (well today's 24x7 environments, in the good old days we
stayed late at work and played with the production hardware during
non-production times. :)

> Hmm.  A ciscoSystems 2600-series can do NAT, right?  And there do exist
> Ethernet modules that plug into the modular bays, right?  Heh...hehheh...

far to expensive.  otherwise i would have done it that way myself.  i'm actually
looking for something cheap made by cisco that can handle NAT, FastE, FDDI and
Token Ring.  the 4[05]00 comes close, but no FastE, only SlowE.

-brian
-- 
"Oh, shut up Buddha."  -Jesus Christ (South Park)