On Mon, Dec 20, 1999 at 10:00:30AM -0500, Jean-Francois Fortier wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
>         I'm looking for something to share a dial-up internet access
> between 2 others mac.  I mean a dial-on-demand router with nat. I know
> netbsd can does the job if my ISP provide me a static IP address (what I
> already have) ... I also know that 68k mac aren't good machine to do it
> because there's no DMA for the serial port (unlike powermac). I've tried
> IpNetRouter on SE30 MacOS 7.5.5 and the result were poor because of the
> hardware limitation...
> 
> My question is:  Will I have exactly the same result if I try it (ppp ddr
> nat) on macbsd 68030 box.

There's a few things in here that should be cleared up:

1.  As far as I know, dial-on-demand PPP requires a static IP address,
although that may have changed.  However, in my own house (two users,
six computers including the NAT router) I have set up a way for any of
us at any time from any computer to RSH the "ppp-up" command, which
connects us to my dynamic-address-giving ISP.  It's a little less
transparent than true dial-on-demand but it works for us, and I was able
to do it without giving out root privs on the NAT box.  At the end of
the ppp-up script, it flushes and reactivates the NAT rules to take the
new address into account, among other things.

2.  I am running NAT via a v.90 modem on a Performa 475 (with full
'040), and I regularly get 5KB/sec download speeds lately, and no
buffer-overflows or anything.  It seems to actually work _better_ at
times than when my PowerMac 8600 was connected to it using MacOS.  The
serial port problems have cleared up very nicely in the last couple of
years.  (I'm running stock NetBSD 1.4, haven't upgraded to 1.4.1 yet
because this system is working.)

Based on my earlier experiences with a IIci, I suspect that you won't do
quite as well with your SE/30 as I have with my P475, but you may find
that you do better under NetBSD than you did under MacOS, particularly
if that's all you're going to have that SE/30 doing.  My IIci did
occasionally give me...what were they..."silo" overflows, perhaps?  It's
been a while.  But it wasn't too bad.

-- 
Charles Sebold, UNIX Systems Specialist                LCMS Unix site:
LCMS - Office of Information Systems                       http://unix.ois.org/
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