[rescue] You see a wild SPARCstation 20. What do?

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sat, 14 Jan 2012, Sandwich Maker wrote:

> i recall sun saying that an ss1+ could route 10bt at wire speed...  an
> mp ss20 could easily be 10x more powerful but perhaps the sbus would
> start to limit it.

Route, probably.

However, NAT and filtering add a fair amount of CPU-bound latency.  At one
time, my gateway was an Ultra 1e m170, and the combination of NAT +
filtering + PPPoE made performance absolutely awful.

I then moved the PPPoE onto a separate box, and performance was tolerable.
However, anything with a large number of connections across the gateway
(e.g. bittorrent) would make the entire connection unusable.

Moving the whole stack onto a modern mini-ITX (VIA C7) system was a
tremendous improvement in both performance and watts consumed.  It was the
first PC-based bit of infrastructure on my network, and that made me a
little sad, but the power consumed by two pizza-box SPARCs just to get me
a rubbish network connection was sadder still.

All systems involved were running OpenBSD with pf, named, and nearly
nothing else.  My connection to the outside is nominally 8Mb/s down and
800kb/s up.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke    |    "It is easier to build two chimneys than to
Elgin, TX            %     keep one in fuel."
USA                  |                            --Benjamin Franklin