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To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
cc: jkh@freebsd.org, evanc@synapse.net, hackers@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject: Re: FreeBSD as a router 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 23 Jun 1995 12:06:31 +0930."
             <199506230236.MAA27725@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> 
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 1995 20:06:18 -0700
Message-ID: <23382.803876778@westhill.cdrom.com>
From: Gary Palmer <gpalmer@westhill.cdrom.com>
Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org
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In message <199506230236.MAA27725@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>, Michael Smith
 writes:
>Is that a 100bT or 100bVG-AnyLan?  There's been lots of rudeness about
>the former going around, but some hard experience would be useful
>to hear about; particularly for those of us attempting to insert
>FreeBieSD into commercial environments. "Oh you know about Unix do you;
>what do you think of 100Mb Ethernets?"8)

We looked HARD at the situation before we made the choice. So far the
only complaint about 100bT that we have had so far is that the damned
DOS packet driver abstraction doesn't allow more than a few hundred
k/sec through it (even on a pentium), which is kinda useless on a
100bT network. Stick a FreeBSD box on it, and I saw (basically) raw
disk throughput (just over 3 mbytes/sec, which is about the speed of
the source disk). So far we haven't tested under extreme load yet, but
that isn't too far off :-)

100bVG-ANYLAN looked better on paper, but there is a slight lack of
support from other people in the industry. HP is about the only
company actvely supporting that format (there is another company
making PC cards I think, and that's about it). On the other hand, most
of the major PC Ethernet card makers have 100bT cards (SMC, 3Com,
etc).  So you may see 100bVG vanishing, which is why we didn't go with
it, despite the known shortcomings of 100bT.

Gary