[ale] 486's as routers?

[Jeff Hubbs]

The notion of taking an eight-year-old PC and turning it into an
arbitrarily fast router (i.e., any faster wouldn't make any difference)
that is highly configurable and expandable/contractible is one of the
things that really gives me a charge about working with Linux.  

This mail message comes to you through a nice, compact NEC Ready 433
(headless, diskless, 486DX/33 with 16MB RAM) that has two ISA NICs in
it.  It boots Coyote Linux from a floppy and can pull down 1.3Mb/s
*sustained* (at least back in the day before general clogging and
capping made that kind of rate scarce).  Infrequently, it crashes and
reboots itself, but it only seems to do that when it's under load and is
probably due to running out of RAM (naturally, there's no swap).  

Given that I can adapt this box to have 3 or more NICs and give it ntp
and UPS-handling daemons if I so choose, it's hard to justify a vendor's
black-box solution.

- Jeff

On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 13:20, cfowler wrote:
> Some business think that if it isn't expensive it is no good. Tell them
> you got a router that is faster and more reliable than a Cisco and
> charge big bucks for it.  
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2002-06-18 at 13:05, Bao C. Ha wrote:
> > 
> > > whats the benifits besides cost to using linux on a 486 as a router?
> > 
> > It is faster than most of your "standard" routers on the market, including
> > the Cisco 2501/17xx series, or those thingy Linksys gateways. It has more
> > memory, ...
> > 
> > > whats the negatives?
> > 
> > Noisy like hell!  Looks like a tank!  Built like a tank!  And drinks more
> > "juices" than three standard 60-watt light bulbs!
> > 
> > > im curious mostly but, i was wondering in case i ever wanted 
> > > to implement
> > > them in a buisness setting.
> > 
> > In a business setting???
> > 
> > Bao
> > 
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> > 
> 
> 
> 
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