[Gllug] 486sx 25 machine - thoughts and comments

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:33:55PM +0100, Chris Bell wrote:
> On Fri 12 Apr, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> > I have a 486sx-25 box with an adaptec scsi card and a 240mb disk (there was a 
> > 500mb disk but I have already put that in another box). The machine has some 
> > sentimental value (I've had it since 93) - as well as 32MB of memory: which 
> > was big for that time.
> > 
> > It has an isa bus and no network card.
> > 
> > Question is: should I chuck it or is there a real use for it?
>    Is it fast enough for a firewall? An ISA 10baseT NIC is not difficult to
> find, and you don't have the usual low memory problem, (computers around
> that age often take the very short SIMMs, and you are limited to about 4MB
> of RAM). Fit two NIC's for an ADSL ethernet to ethernet firewall? Or should
> it be a 486DX to get sufficient speed?

I use a DX-33 for my firewall/NAT box, and it never even breaks into a sweat.
Considering that the difference between a 486SX and DX is only that the SX
has no hardware floating point (as opposed to the 386DX/SX which had 32-bit
and 16-bit data busses respectively) I'd be happy to use it as a firewall.

You could also put a multi-port serial card in there, bung ssh on, and you
then have a nice ssh-able terminal server.  Terminal servers are good.
ssh-capable terminal servers are even better.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

    This is a signature.  There are many like it but this one is mine.


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