Thanks to everyone who responded to my post about the feasibility of 
attempting to run a 10/100 ethernet card on our ancient 486. I've 
decided to upgrade to a faster machine for Samba.

One more question on this matter, however: We already have a 
Macintosh Performa 5400/180 doing IP routing via Mac OS 9.1 and 
IPNetRouter (a Mac shareware utility). It has 64 MB of memory and a 
Macally 10/100 ethernet card. This setup works very well for its 
intended purpose, and I've always had the idea that a "Classic" Mac 
OS machine doing PPP/ethernet routing made a good natural firewall.

My question is, should I switch the Mac, which already has a fast 
NIC, to NetBSD PPC and run Samba there, and use the old 486/33 (which 
already has a 56K modem and a 10 MBit NIC) for Internet routing? I 
really like IPNetRouter, and kind of hate to give it up, and have 
even seen it recommended by some NetBSD users, but I don't want to 
cling to it if NetBSD on the old PC can do the job just as well or 
better.

The alternative is to completely trash the old 486 and get a Pentium 
II box or a PowerMac off eBay to run Samba, and keep the 5400 running 
IPNetRouter.

Gary Montcalm
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