looks like your equipment is destined for the museum.
mac OS/X features many of the unix daemons under the
GUI. so, you have the choice of netbsd and mac os/x.
IMO, anything (I mean Intel PII) that is not RISC
based does not scale well under heavy load.
but all the same, it costs more to buy a macppc than
an intel box.
regards
-kamal

--- Gary Montcalm <garym@shreve.net> wrote:
> 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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