Hi,

On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, John Ruschmeyer wrote:

> > Although I am not a mac guy, I have a lots of parts for the quadra 650
> > including two 10baseT ethernet cards, and an adaptor to use a pc monitor,
> > keyboard, and mouse. So, there would be nothing that I would need to buy
> > for the mac. On the down side the mac is terribly slow, and now that I
> > have a quadra (this mac will not support 2 NICs) hooked to the cable modem
> > it only downloads at about 14K per sec. (this is under mac OS). Plus, this
> > computer is really ticking me off, because it should be able to bus much
> > more than that.
>
> The single NIC limitation is only a limitation of the MacOS networking
> software. There are packages (IPNetRouter comes to mind) which run under
> MacOS, support multiple interfaces, and can act as a firewall/router/NAT
> box.

This computer is a quadra 630, and I tried to install NetBSD on it but it
doesn't see the harddrive (its IDE) or the NIC. Some told me that I could
get a second NIC for it but I can't seem to find one for it (this computer
does not use nubus).

> Also your download speed sounds software-related, so it may be unfair to
> characterize that as the performance to be expected under NetBSD.

This sound right! I was able to get better performance from it with an ftp
client. And I would expect even better performanc under NetBSD.

> > As for the Sparc Classic, it will cost me $110 to get a quad 10baseT
> > ethernet card. And it will need a bigger hard drive and more memory. Plus
> > it does not have a floppy drive. I must admit that I never used a sun
> > before and I am a little bit nervous about playing with the openPROM.
>
> How big a drive is in it? You should be able to set up a minimal router
> config with less than 1GB... probably a lot less. In lieu of the floppy, do
> you have a CD-ROM and a way to burn the sparc ISO to a CD-R?

It is a 500 meg drive. And I would think that I could setup NetBSD on it
with out a problem, but I would really like to be able to build everything
from source. I have tried to do this with my laptop (it has a 1 gig
drive), and it ran out of drive space.


> > 1. Does NetBSD support a quad 10baseT ethernet card? (I can't seem to find
> > this in the faq.)
>
> I don't know, but do you need 4 additional net ports? If not, you can
> probably find a cheap single port card (possibly one of the ones combined
> with a SCSI adapter) on ebay for a lot less than $110. FYI, you can do a
> router with a single NIC, albeit with some performance penalty.

I really don't need the additional prots right now, but I thought that if
things didn't work out the the cable modem that I could use it for
something else, and then it may need the additional ports.

-Al