[geeks] # of machines running currently

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 04:42:55PM -0500, Tom Borton wrote:
> I have a 486 running two ISA D-Link NICs under Linux.  There were really
> only four steps:
> -	With each NIC by itself in the box, I ran the D-Link config
> utility from a DOS boot disk and picked settings that I knew wouldn't
> conflict.  Not hard when the only things in it were video and the super
> I/O card (IDE, serial, parallel).
> -	Added the following to lilo.conf:
> 	append="ether=10,0x300,eth0 ether=11,0x320,eth1"
> 	so the kernel would recognize them.
> -	Defined aliases in conf.modules for eth0 and eth1 (to ne for the
> ISA NE2000 module in my case.
> -	Defined the ne options in conf.modules to identify both cards:
> 	options ne             io=0x300,0x320 irq=10,11
> 
> This is running on the 2.2 kernels - I haven't tried upgrade to the 2.4
> kernel on that machine under the "if it ain' broke, don't fix it rule",
> but I don't remember anything off the top of my head that would be
> different.  And I've only tried BSD on SPARC hardware so far, so I don't
> know about the ISA support there.

Ack.  That is an ugly set of steps.  Perhaps nescesary.  That does remind me
why none of my main intel machines (file server and main workstation) have any 
ISA cards in them though.

I actually managed to get along fine with linux and ISA until PNP ISA was all 
the rage.  I felt paralyzed and went through several years where I never 
recompiled a kernal because that would mean having to face those ISA cards.
I have no desire to repeat that.  

Which still leaves the question of what to do with that 486.  It served me well
for many years.  My new plan is to use it as a caching proxy.  With only one
ethernet card I should be able to get things to work more easily.  If I put
NetBSD on this box, would that allow me to avoid that horrible ISAPNP package 
that linux forces on us?  Anyone?

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd