From owner-freebsd-newbies Tue May 30 18:21:46 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Received: from gargoyle.apana.org.au (brisba6.lnk.telstra.net [139.130.66.200]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A217537BDB3 for ; Tue, 30 May 2000 18:21:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au) Received: (from uucp@localhost) by gargoyle.apana.org.au (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA04280; Wed, 31 May 2000 11:21:26 +1000 (EST) (envelope-from dougy@gargoyle.apana.org.au) Received: from roadrunner.apana.org.au(203.3.126.132), claiming to be "ROADRUNNER" via SMTP by gargoyle.apana.org.au, id smtpdHB4278; Wed May 31 11:21:24 2000 Message-ID: <046301bfca9e$a3ba1cb0$847e03cb@ROADRUNNER> From: "Doug Young" To: "Bryan Otteson" , References: <002701bfcaa4$2da68bc0$9ab58dd0@arescomputer> Subject: Re: Re using a 486 Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 11:22:06 +1000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.5600 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.5600 Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > I know I sound like a retard, but I've only been trying to mess around with > a unix-style machine for a couple of weeks now, so humor me. > > What's a "gateway" computer, or setup, or whatever? > The term "gateway" in this context is synonomous with "router" as far as I can gather. Basically people who have a LAN connected to the internet find it beneficial to have a machine dedicated to running the connection. All the setups I'm working with have plenty of public range IP addresses, so there isn't a need to mess around with network address translation etc. The actual "gateway" machine doesn't need to be particularly powerful ..... even a 386 will work fine because apart from forwarding the odd packet here & there its not doing anything much. For what its worth, the last time I asked I was told even the horribly expensive Cisco router thingies only have 386 CPU's. This sort of thing is FreeBSD's forte .... its at least as stable as the commercial unixes & if all its gonna do is sit in a corner someplace and more often than not never get looked at then the price is right :) For workstation use I prefer commercial unixes like SCO & Solaris which come with "proper" window managers, unlike the awfully tacky & buggy KDE / Gnome disaster cases. There are a bunch of alternative ones that the more experienced users around here recommend. I've never bothered since the mailing list archives suggest there are countless problems with FreeBSD window managers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message