From owner-freebsd-isp Fri May 24 11:02:01 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id LAA11932 for isp-outgoing; Fri, 24 May 1996 11:02:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from etinc.com (etinc.com [204.141.244.98]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA11926; Fri, 24 May 1996 11:01:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dialup-usr11.etinc.com (dialup-usr11.etinc.com [204.141.95.132]) by etinc.com (8.6.12/8.6.9) with SMTP id OAA01368; Fri, 24 May 1996 14:06:49 -0400 Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 14:06:49 -0400 Message-Id: <199605241806.OAA01368@etinc.com> X-Sender: dennis@etinc.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.0.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" From: dennis@etinc.com (Dennis) Subject: Re: The view from here (was Re: ISDN Compression Load on CPU) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >> While I will not claim that my requirements are the same as very many >> others, you cannot dismiss them at just the ravings of a lunatic. >> I've put my money (more than $10M of it) where my mouth is. Sorry for >> the long message; I'll take my UUNET hat off now, and go away quietly. > >Nope, sorry Louis, but, like Cassandra, you must now be villified and >endlessly castigated for being correct. :-) > >I've never made *any secret of the fact that I think that PCs are >nasty little pieces of silicon excreta. Ill designed, ill conceived, >ill subsequently bred. I daresay most people who've spent any serious >amounts of time trying to push the edge of the envelope with a PC feel >the same way. There are also lists as long as your arm of all the >applications to which PC technology should _not_ be put, and the road >to success littered with the bones of those who would not heed their >warnings. Pretty much all of the applications Louis (and Karl) >describe would be on that list for me - give me a dedicated router >with a fan as the only moving part any day. I don't like getting >paged at 2am. > >Have I said enough bad things about PCs yet? No, I don't think so. >There's also the issue of Quality Control - two words you'll rarely >see stuck together in the PC marketplace. You've got SCSI controllers >from Croatia plugged into motherboards from Togo talking to disk >drives that were purchased during a $0.10-a-megabyte special the local >discount merchant ran. Several dozen failure-prone variables, at >least half of which have probably never been tested in combination. These are the words of your "leader"? Most of this is your own fault, for buying cheap unknown cards, discouraging and ridiculing commercial vendors for charging for things that are worth it and not giving away their work, and using software thats been slapped together by someone who doesnt have enough time to spend on it to make it really work well. you get yourself a good adaptec disk controller (thanks Justin), which isnt really an issue with a router anyways, a good ethernet card and driver (thanks david) and a good, well supported WAN interface and you've got a very reliable product that rivals most of the stuff out there. All of the routers on the market are just basically PCs, in one form or another. Cisco OS is just a hacked up unix os, so what your really saying is that the guys at cisco write better code than you do. I think that a lot of the people on this list would take exception to that. shame on you. Dennis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25 for BSD/OS, FreeBSD and LINUX