[SunRescue] Help with IPC serial ports...

[apotter at icsa.net]

Greetz:

The IPCs are painfully slow, and their utility is (IMHO) limited, particularly 
in view of the fact that IPXen are showing up cheap (free?) and have `prox 
twice the bang.

That being said, I still have a couple of IPCs on the home net, as nameservers 
and NIS servers.  I have a SMALL lan (less than a dozen nodes) and less than 5 
users in the YP tables, so they're not getting the crap pounded out of them.

I run OpenBSD on these boxes, more because of the smaller memory footprint 
than anything else, although it "just works" for all of my needs.  Your linux 
options are limited distro-wise, and RedHat, even though I am a large RedHat 
fan, wants more ram for the install program than I am willing to park in an 
IPC.

I've never even attempted to use a Sparc with a modem as in Internet gateway.  
The serial ports (as you have discovered) suck.  Honestly, this is a task for 
which they were never intended.

<heresy>

Instead, keep your eyes out for an old PC.  Good serial hardware is either 
built-in, or cheap, and these days the price is right.  I have 9 or 10 Sparcs 
running at the house, but the firewall is a 486/160 (built out of 
dumpster-dive parts) and aside from the IDE disks that keep crapping out, it 
works just fine.

</heresy>


Hope this helps.....

AL