[ale] 486's as routers?

[Charles Shapiro]

Ooh, I built a dial-up bridge out of a '486 with Linux Router Project
Linux in 1999, and it's still goin' strong. I gave an ALE talk about it;
notes  are at ( http://www.ale.org/talks/shapiro_lrp.txt ).    It runs
headless and without a hard drive, so power consumption is small.

Goods:
It's real cheap
It'll run in all kinds of ugly environments -- '486s don't take a lot of
cooling. Mine runs in a room which is only air-conditioned when my wife
is at home, and hasn't had a problem (knock on wood..).
It's all yours -- everything on it is open to inspection and change.
You're at the mercy of no vendor, and you can personally fix any bugs
you find. You'll also learn a lot about linux and networking putting it
together.
You're keeping one more piece of outdated equipment out of the landfill.



Bads
It's all yours -- you have to put it together and maintain it. Better
document thoroughly!
Getting replacement parts when it breaks is going to be an increasing
problem as time goes on.
You're keeping one more piece of outdated equipment from the hands of an
aspiring, but poor, coder.
It's big and relatively noisy. I keep mine in a separate room, but I
have that luxury.
It's s l o w to boot after vacations or maintenance.
Eventually the motherboard battery will die. Mine is already too far
gone to do the clock well, and the keyboard interface is already dead. 

On balance, this solution has worked well for me, and if & when I go to
broadband I plan to build another box like it, probably a slow pentium
with a bit more memory and a zip drive.

--  CHS

On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 12:57, Stephen Turner wrote:
> whats the benifits besides cost to using linux on a 486 as a router?
> whats the negatives?
> im curious mostly but, i was wondering in case i ever wanted to implement
> them in a buisness setting.
> 
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