I can somewhat answer your NAT question: I use a 25Mhz Centris 650
(040) to serve as a NAT box for a network of 4 macintosh clients. It works
every well and "top" reports that the cpu is around 97 percent idle even
when it's under a load...dunno if that means anything or not, but to my
newbie-unix mind that tells me you can connect a lot more than 4 computers
to it. 
 
SCSI: how large is your drive? I had a 230-meg drive in my IIci (another
NetBSD machine I have) and I noticed a good speed jump when I put a newer
1gig SCSI drive in it....I mostly noticed the speed jump when using MacOS. 

For extra speed when using the CLI, get "dt" which will give you
white-on-black text, plus mouse support and cut-and-paste ability. dt lets
you use the standard apple-c, apple-v to cut and paste, which I really
like. 

dt also displays text many times faster than the standard console or
whatever.
 
I usually run "screen" atop a dt session for extra coolness and usability.
I have a picture of an SE/30 running NetBSD 1.4 and dt and screen at
http://www.haque.net/screenshots/get_img.phtml?id=212

Also, is X in color in 1.5 or is it still B&W? I got color X working on my
IIci after a bit of trail and error under NetBSD 1.4 and it ran
Windowmaker fine, albiet somewhat slowly. (thanks to paul goyette for his
color X help!!)

paul's site, by the way is at http://www.whooppee.com/

modems: my IIci, which is older than the Q800, seems to be able to use the
external Zoom 56k modem just fine. It connects aroun 44k, though, but that
may just be my phone line's fault. Dunno. My SE/30, however, spits out
error messages when I connect that to the net over a modem. The SE/30 will
connect and stay connected reliably and even do NAT but it will just tell
me that it is having trouble every now and then. I don't recall what the
exact message was, but I do believe it is related to the older uart chip.

All three of my NetBSD macs are very reliabe. I had the IIci do a kernel
panic once shortly after starting dt and accidentally unplugged the
keyboard. 
 
I've had the IIci have uptimes as high as 40 days...it would be higher but
I find myself needing to boot into MacOS every now and then for one reason
or another :D heheh (I have a 250megs MacOS partition which has a lot of
programs and data on it..photoshop, some MS Word documents, etc)

Chris

 On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Pat Wendorf wrote:

> Thanks to all of you who helped with the basic install, the Quadra 800
> system is running perfectly. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I
> didn't have to configure X, it just sorta worked out of the box. I do
> have a few more questions that someone might be able to answer:
> 
> - The SCSI performance seems a little slow.  I know this is a fairly old
> machine, but I have a few x86 boxes of similar CPU speed (33mhz), and
> the IDE on my 486's seems significantly faster in NetBSD.  Not that I'm
> complaining, I'm just wondering if it's the drive or the architecture. 
> Once something is loaded into memory, it seems to run reasonably fast.
> 
> - The installer I found on the Walkthrough page does not create the
> /dev/ttyE0 device.  I had to add that manually.  It did however create a
> ttye0 (lowercase "e").  Not too sure if that is a bug in the installer
> or not.
> 
> - How do I enable soft-updates?
> 
> - Why does the /etc/rc.conf come so bare?  The 1.4.2 x86 NetBSD
> /etc/rc.conf has all sorts of options that are turned off by default,
> but are already documented in rc.conf.  Yes, I'm very lazy :)
> 
> - If I created a /dev/ttyE1 E2, etc... would I be able to have virtual
> terminals? (assuming I enabled them in /etc/ttys).  If so, what key
> sequence do I need to use to switch between them?
> 
> - What type of stability does this platform offer?  Should I trust it to
> do secondary DNS or similarly light tasks for a network of 25
> computers?  What about something like more demanding like dialup
> NAT/Firewall/Socks5 with 25 computers?
> 
> - Can the serial ports on a Quadra 800 handle 57,600 baud (or 115,200).
> In the x86 world we have to worry about which UART chip our serial ports
> use when adding a 28.8K or higher external modem (UART buffer
> overflows), is it the same with older Macs?
> 
> Sorry for inundating you all with questions but I'm very excited to have
> this running and want to explore every possibility :)
> 
> -- 
> 
> Pat Wendorf
>