I started to look into this a while back for the same reason
(my ADSL installation is scheduled for Monday, yippee!).

The path I've gone down is to use one of those funky parallel
port ethernet adapters that were popular for laptops several
years ago.  I bought a Linksys unit (which is actually made
by D-Link) at Fry's for about $100 and have been porting a
Linux driver that I found on the net.  The driver basically
works now, though it definitely needs some cleanup.

The bad news is that the driver currently only uses the
standard parallel port mode -- not EPP or ECP.  This limits
throughput to about 300kbs downstream and 800kbs upstream.
I might be able to bump those numbers up a bit with some
tuning/cleanup, but I think they're about at the limit of
what one can do in standard mode.

I've tried the adapter on a laptop running Win95 and seen
throughput of at least 2mbs, so I know that EPP and/or ECP
mode can make a significant difference.  The problem is that
I don't have any documentation which describes how to use
those modes on the adapter.  In fact, I don't have any
documentation at all, besides comments in the Linux driver.

I've just contacted the author of the Linux driver and
asked if he has any useful documentation.  The early word is
that he doesn't, though he is going to take a look into his
archives and let me know if he finds anything. 

I will probably get around to contacting D-Link for help
eventually, though I don't have much free time right now.
If someone else wants to get involved and make things happen
sooner I'd be glad to give them what I've got.  Using the
extended modes it ought to be possible to get throughput
of at least 1.5mbs on the SHARK -- good enough not to
bottleneck most xDSL and cable services today.  Without
extended mode support you'll probably only want to use this
setup if your service is clamped to 384kbs or less in the
downstream direction.

If someone is really going to go the UMI card route that's
great, and I'll chip in some money.  But I expect that it
will be a huge time investment, as we never did much testing
of the PCI stuff.  If people's primary interest is just in
using the SHARK as a home router for xDSL/cable, then
getting the extended modes to work on the parallel port
adapter is likely to be much more productive (though maybe
less fun).

			-Jay


> Subject: Shark, 2nd ether?
> To: None <port-arm32@netbsd.org>
> From: Phil Nelson <phil@cs.wwu.edu>
> List: port-arm32
> Date: 08/11/1999 10:34:20 
> 
> Hi,
> 
>   I was wondering if someone has put a second ethernet interface on a
> shark.  It looks like I'll be trying TCI@home (aka ATT@home) and
> I don't want to pay for multiple IPs ($5/mo/ip address!) and am thinking
> about a gateway machine (with ipnat ...) for my home network.  What
> I'd like is to have a Shark be the gateway so it could run with no fan
> noise all the time.  
> 
>   I'd be interested in any information on this that anyone has.  
> PCI? USB? ...
> 
>   Thanks.
> 
> -- 
> Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
> e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        Coda: http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu
> http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil    


-- 
Jay Kistler
FORE Systems, Inc.
2115 O'Nel Drive
San Jose, CA  95131
Tel: 408 487-4380
E-mail: jkistler@fore.com