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From: Robert Shady <rls@mail.id.net>
Message-Id: <199609191427.KAA09043@server.id.net>
Subject: Re: Routers - hardware received wisdom
In-Reply-To: <199609190027.UAA21659@sabre.goldsword.com> from "John T. Farmer" at "Sep 18, 96 08:27:32 pm"
To: jfarmer@sabre.goldsword.com (John T. Farmer)
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 10:27:20 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: dennis@etinc.com, nik@blueberry.co.uk, isp@freebsd.org,
        jfarmer@goldsword.com
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> I think that Dennis' comment & what Joe said in his note answered a question 
> that I've had lurking in the back of my mind, "Just what is sufficient to run 
> a FreeBSD T-1 capable router?"
> 
> Granted that a no-name MB & 133Mhz 486 is running around $120, but I
> "happen to have" a 386/33, 8mb, 300mb disk sitting in the corner, with
> an ethernet card in it (isa only :^,).  And I have a need for a T-1 capable
> box soon.  Since it would be a fairly un-saturated T-1, I suspect that
> I will be able to get away with it for a while...  Then the question becomes,
> how many 56/64k/128/256k frame relay links could a "little" box like that
> handle?  (Must be the Scots in me, I hate to throw away anything!)

Let's think about this logically people.. We're only talking about a MAX
of 187 Kilo-Bytes per second for a single T1 line...  I've got calculators
that could max that out!  Now.. When you start throwing multiple ethernet
devices in there, and you want to provide wire-to-wire speed acrossed those,
that is another story..  We're using a 486DX4-120Mhz w/32MB of RAM here, and
it is running 3 100Mb Intel Etherexpress cards, and 2 10Mb SMC Elite Ultra
cards.. It does a decent job, although I don't know that I would expect to
be able to get full wire speeds on all ethernet cards simultaneously..  But
luckily, we have enough segments and switches that we don't need to worry
about that, yet.

	-- Rob
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