From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jul 7 07:50:41 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id HAA16960 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 07:50:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from horst.bfd.com (horst.bfd.com [204.160.242.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id HAA16954 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 07:50:39 -0700 (PDT) Received: from harlie.bfd.com (bastion.bfd.com [204.160.242.14]) by horst.bfd.com (8.8.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA28881; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 07:50:34 -0700 (PDT) Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 07:50:34 -0700 (PDT) From: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" To: Mike Tancsa cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Building a multiport router out of FreeBSD In-Reply-To: <3.0.2.32.19970706122919.026d6320@sentex.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Sun, 6 Jul 1997, Mike Tancsa wrote: > Hi, > We are going to be upping our connection to the net to 5Mbps in the near > future. Our upstream provider is going to provide us with a managed CISCO > that we will have no access to unfortunately. Since we have fairly complex > routing requirements, we need some sort of multi port router in the office. > Considering I can build a Pentium 133 with a 4 Ethernet cards for around > $1200 Canadian (~$800 USD), this is significantly cheaper and in some ways > provides many advantages over a dedicated multiport router. I was > wondering if anyone else out there have a similar setup ? Would a Pentium > 133 with 32meg of RAM be enough memory and CPU horse power? I imagine it > would have 2 100Mbp ethernet cards and probably 3 10Mb ethernet cards in it > and I would manage the routing via gated. We are only single homed and do > not require EBGP. The box would act as a dedicated router with the > firewall features enabled in the kernel. We get wire speed between 4 10Mbit nets using a 486Dx2/66 with NE2000 clone NICs and 16M of ram, so your solution should do pretty good. At this point, the best low-overhead PCI nics are the Intel cards. Avoid 3Com as if your job depended on it.