I've just finished setting up a Quadra 840av with NetBSD 1.6. I also have a
Compaq Proliant 850R that has been running OpenBSD on for about 6 months.
I'm using OpenBSD & NetBSD to learn UNIX, to integrate and secure small
business networks. I had plans to use the 840av as a NAT/router/firewall/IDS
machine.

My only complaint to-date (with the BSD on the Mac) is the time clock drift.
From what I understand, this is a hardware level interrupt problem and may
never be resolved. Running idle, it loses 1-2 seconds every 20 minutes. If I
do anything extra to increase the load (i.e. FTP a file), the clock can
drift some 30 seconds or more every 1-2 minutes.

Where this may present a problem is in the accuracy of log files. I was
planning on using 840av as part of an Intrusion Detection System but without
accurate log files, this may not work well...I will have to wait and see.

I like NetBSD on the 840av. It operates very similar to OpenBSD
(configuration, syntax, capabilities, etc). OpenBSD-mac68k is (pretty much)
a port of NetBSD-mac68k. Except, OpenBSD seems about 2 or 3 years out of
date, as far as hardware driver support on the Mac is concerned (especially,
bug free SCSI, MACE and Farallon Ethernet drivers).

I have not seen (full on) the DMA bottleneck that others have mentioned
should be there. I'm only config'ing & compiling at this point and haven't
really run any real-world benchmark tests other than dnetc clients. I did
expect the 80/40Mhz 68040 to do a whole lot better than it did on dnetc (see
below).

However...when all is said and done, I _REALLY_ like OpenBSD on my 850R!

OpenBSD on Intel the best software/hardware platform for BSD UNIX for many
reasons. Hardware support mainly, security is second, and BSD/UNIX
portability is a close third. Besides, think about it, what better way to
use an Intel box but to load a completely microsoft-free OS which is
(essentially) more Mac OSX like than any other UNIX.

Current setups:

Macintosh SE/30 - a $7,000 paper weight (my first Mac/still runs :-)

Macintosh Quadra 840av
 64MB RAM
 514MB + 2.1GB SCSI Hard Drives
 Farallon EtherWave NuBus Adapter
 NetBSD v1.6
 dnetc v2.8016 OGR-25 benchmark for core #3 [143,876 nodes/sec]

Compaq Proliant 850R
 200Mhz Pentium Pro (dual processor capable) w/256K cache
 128MB RAM
 Smart 2P RAID Controller
 (2) 4.3GB Ultra SCSI Hot Swap Drives
 OpenBSD v3.2
 dnetc v2.8010 OGR-25 Benchmark for core #0 [1,065,052 nodes/sec]

Macintosh PowerMac 8500
 200Mhz 604e (dual processor capable) w/512K cache
 80MB RAM
 1.2GB + 2GB SCSI Hard Drives
 MacOS v9.1
 dnetc v2.8016 OGR-25 Benchmark for core #0 [2,184,777 nodes/sec] <- winner


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 \___\_\____/_/ |_/____/ /___/___/____/____/_/ |_|.NET
 -----------------------------------------------------
 More processing power than some third world countries


On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 12:24 AM, jpy@zebis.com <mailto:jpy@zebis.com> wrote:
> I'm just curious what other people are doing with their setups.. I am now up
> and running with my SE/30, and although I didn't expect it to be fast, when I
> started compiling ircII today at 2pm I didn't expect it to still be going at
> 2am. I have no real purpose for this machine, but I guess I was hoping I
> could mess around with it a little more. At this rate I'm really kind of
> afraid to try compiling or extracting anything else. If anyone is running a
> Quadra 840av (40mhz 040), what is it like? I have one that I could get going,
> but I would have to get some memory and a hard drive for it..
> 
> -Jason
> 
> _______________________________________________________
> 
>