[SunRescue] Re: Help!

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Of course the embsd.org guys have the right idea and are working with
> FlashRAM cards and such.....  That also gives them an order of magnitude
> more space than can be found on a floppy to, and almost infinitely more
> real-world reliability than any floppy drive.

Yeah, I was looking at their site.  Pretty spiffy.  I might have a spare
40 meg drive around (from an old notebook) to through in the 486 to give
them a try.
 
> I had some chipset problems on the 486 I tried too -- it had some PCI
> slots that were not quite up to snuff and I think there was some
> hardware conflict causing wait states on the ISA bus.

Every PCI 486 I've seen has had some really nasty problems.  My 486 is
just straight ISA (well local bus IDE and video, but those are on the
motherboard). 

> I really really really hate PCs (even though I have three in production
> and another two in test and two old laptops also in test!).  If I could
> have found a cheap/free Sbus ethernet card I've have tried my SS1+ (or
> maybe an SS2) as a gateway, but I can't seem to find such things at any
> decent price (usually they're about three times as much as a whole new
> machine can be had for!).

I strongly dislike PCs also (as do most people on the list from what I've
seen).  However, the price performance ratio really makes it hard to argue
against how crude the machines are.  I know it is that type of thinking
that propogates the POS machines, but as a college student, it is hard to
afford more than a few good machines, and they rest end up being whats
cheap or free.
 
> I also have a GIF tunnel for routing my real non-NAT'ed network through
> the cable network, though that's mostly unused now that I have the DSL
> line and my real network's routed directly over it.

GIF tunnel?

> If that's just a 1mbit aDSL line then you shouldn't have any worries
> even with a 386.  My cable modem is/was at least 2mbits and I've now got
> a 3.0mbit aDS line too.

Oh, my DSL line is only 640k.  My understanding is that ISA is 3mbit, so a
640k feed to/from two ethernet cards shouldn't be too troublesome.

> >  I can't imagine that NAT would saturate this
> > machine.
> 
> A NAT needs memory and CPU power, things old 486's can sometimes be lacking.
> 
> The deciding factor is how many machines you'll have behind the NAT and
> what they'll be doing.

Most of the machines behind the NAT only do email and web.  Two of the run
AOL, but not for very long stretchs of time.  There are about 15 machines
behind that nat, but usually only 4 are in use as once.  And the 486 in
question currently has 28megs of ram (it had more, but I was able to reuse
it on my p75 file server).

I would use my file server, but as I'm not highly confident in my ability
to secure a linux machine while running general serivices on it, I want to
seperate the firewall to a different machine.  Further, I've already maxed
out all the expansion slots on this machine. 




--
Joshua Boyd