Topic:  can an oldish PeeCee with a bunch of ISA ne2000s route with any real
throughput? 

Ok, to summarize from the previous message thread:

- its cheaper to buy an ISA box full of $15 ethernet cards than a single
quad-interface card
- nobody has brought forward a quick and well-known software solution for
monitoring IP byte counts on an ethernet network without using a whole whack
of ethernet cards (as opposed to one interface, software monitoring packets
and counting individual packets and bytes based on IP)

So my next step is to fill a PeeCee with cheapy ethernet cards.  Next issue;

How crappy is ISA?  Will, say, 5 ISA Ne2000s bring a 486/33 to its knees
trying to deal with interrupts and such when under heavy network load?

I know its certainly possible to run such a configuration -- I'm currently
doing so.  I have some old 486SLC/33 box with 5 Kingston NE2000 ISA cards in
it, 2 subnets behind NAT, 2 subnets off my main internet default path, and
then the default itself.  This seems to work nicely -- I boot from a floppy
and I have a miminalist kernel that gets the machine going far enough to start
routing packets -- I have an rc script that does ifconfig, ipf, ipnat, and a
few routes, and thats it. 

Wirespeed throughput doesn't seem too hot on the machine I have.  For internet
forwarded connections, its fine because of the relatively low speed of our
internet link (T1), but when doing ftp/scp type stuff LAN to LAN, transfer
rates tend to vary between 150kbytes/s to 500kbytes/s.  Other than that the
machine has run well enough to support my office with minimal complaints for
the last 10 months or so.

Ok so how about if we were talking about a Pentium 75Mhz-120Mhz, with PCI
cards instead of ISA?  Would this help?  Is it still a bad idea?

I'd welcome any comments on this subject.
EJR
--
Erik Rungi
Openface Inc.