Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996 23:01:33 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: mrcpu@cdsnet.net (Jaye Mathisen) Cc: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, andreas@knobel.gun.de, dennis@etinc.com, hm@altona.hamburg.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Multi-Port Async Cards Message-ID: <199601290501.XAA02869@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960128154203.9779Y-100000@schizo.cdsnet.net> from "Jaye Mathisen" at Jan 28, 96 03:43:58 pm
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> On Sun, 28 Jan 1996, Joe Greco wrote: > > > Portmasters are junk. If you're going to get a specialized terminal > > server, buy an Annex. Or better yet,.... > > I would be interested in hearing the rationale behind the claim that > portmasters are junk. We kind of went the other way, and bailed on > multiport serial cards, with the assorted hassles and such, and went to > the portmaster, and they've been a dream. I've been through this before, I don't really have the time or energy to go into it right now, but the Portmasters have caused various problems at every site that I am aware of. I've had to work hacks for customers because of Livingston brokenness. I see no favorable points for them, aside from their relatively low cost, which I would also suggest may actually be a reason NOT to buy them. > If I could solve my RAID box/FreeBSD 2.1.0 problem, I'd be completely > FreeBSD as well. > > The argument about spare parts is specious at best, Anybody in this > business in any serious way has spare parts out the wazoo... Yes, but if you're an ISP with 50 modems hanging off of two Portmasters, how many spare Portmasters do you have in stock? How quickly could you be up and running if disaster took one of your PM's offline? Two?? Somebody asked me why I don't use "real" routers like Ciscos. It's the same argument. With Cisco mantaining months of backlog, it's a pain to do business with them. Even though they might expedite a replacement in case of disaster, I feel more comfortable knowing that I can go down to CompUSA and pick up a six-pack of NE-2000's and stuff them on a 386DX/40 and have a respectable router within an hour. I have two routers here that resemble that description! They run mostly idle. One of them routes packets for news.sol.net, runs at 80% idle, and is handling a minimum of 300 packets per second (NNTP is soooo chatty). I'm certainly not running cutting-edge PC equipment so I'm fairly confident that if I were ever to run into performance problems, I could drop a couple of multiport PCI ethernet cards into a low end Pentium and I'm still nowhere near the cost of a Cisco. This FreeBSD stuff is great. I can build all the equipment an ISP would need using it. I can do so more cheaply than the "specialized" counterparts. And best of all it all runs UNIX. Show me "gdb" running on a Portmaster or Cisco. Show me customized accounting software running on a Portmaster or Cisco. I totally agree with what you said. :-) Any ISP will absolutely have spare parts or at least leverage-able parts. PC parts. Cheap, easy, commonplace. Are there tradeoffs? Yes, I'm sure they are. Are they hurting (or likely to hurt) me? I don't think so. I'll take my FreeBSD terminal servers, thank you. Praxis, Mycogen, Daneel, Demerzel, Dahl and Gorgon have served faithfully through multiple versions of FreeBSD, on CPU's ranging from 386sx/16 to 386dx/40, for years. Others I have built also serve faithfully. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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