On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 12:32:00PM +0100, Julien Cabessut wrote:

 > I don't know if I'm posting to this list the supposed way, please forgive me 
 > if I made a mistake... A question poped up in my mind while browsing 
 > Securityfocus... why not use the DC as a network analyzer, sniffer, password 
 > cracker, intrusion detection system ? I mean, with the huge amount of 
 > existing tools in NetBSD to perform such tasks, the software side is no 
 > issue. Do you think the Dreamcast cpu (and maybe, that vector-crunching-one 
 > by its side), has the power it needs to perform such tasks ? The necessary 
 > amount of RAM ? Uh, something I'm suddenly aware of : where to put the logs ? 
 > (those poor VMUs are gonna blow if used for this purpose !)

The problem is that the Ethernet interface on the DC isn't exactly
a high-performance piece of hardware.  It's a crappy Ethernet chip
connected to a small SRAM buffer, which is too small to sniff an
entire network's worth of traffic.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>