[rescue] Fast Ethernet with a Sparc Classic

[Kurt Nowak]

Thanks to everyone for sharing your wealth of information. So, it looks
like the QFE would be a senseless in a Classic with my bandwidth
requirements. Also, since I will be needing to stream video and process
other modern bandwidth hogging stuff, a faster machine makes sense. I
suppose I could make the hme happen with an Ultra-1e but the power
consumption would be a problem. Since I don't want to acquire any more
hardware and wish to utilize what I have, I think Ive decided to just use
one of my two Sunfire V100s. According to the spec sheet, I was surprised
to see that it only consumes ~30W compared to the Classic which draws over
100W. A cheap, older iX86 based machine with a pair of fast NICs would have
been my next choice but I don't have one lying around. Thanks again,
everyone!


On Fri, May 31, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Kurt Nowak <knowak at alumni.calpoly.edu>wrote:

> Sadly, after many years I have to retire my SS2 for my personal home
> firewall and ipsec gateway, since my cable provider is pumping out 20+ Mb/s
> and and the Sun4c just cant handle that kind of bandwidth. I am
> contemplating putting a quad fast ethernet card in my Sparc Classic since
> its a Sun4M and quiet and compact enough - not as much of a power hog as an
> SS5/SS10/SS20 too. My questions are, 1) can an SS Classic even take a quad
> fast ethernet sbus card? 2) If so, would anyone be able to predict what
> kind of performance I could get with this if its even possible? I'll be
> running OpenBSD as I have happily been doing for years with my old Sparcs.
> My other option is to do overkill and use a Sunfire V100 that's just
> sitting around doing nothing... Its too noisy though for running 24/7, so I
> want to avoid that....Looking forward to the bandwidth though!