On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Mike Frisch wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Jan 1997, Wonko the Sane wrote:
> 
> > yea, i am definitely going to put the modem on one of the SUN 3/180's
> 
> Be prepared for lost packets and system load...  Seriously, an Intel
> machine with a 16550 UART can handle a modem much more smoothly than any
> Sun will.

I used a 3/50 as my home router for a long, long time, and it works
fairly well. Packet loss was not a problem. Nor was load, since
the machine was dedicated to routing. (It wasn't usable for anything
else; with only 4 MB of RAM and a slow CPU and disk, it took a
painful amount of time--and a lot of swapping--just to telnet to
it and log in.)

If the machine is also used interactively, load is a problem even
if you do have enough memory. When my personal workstation at home
was a 3/60, I used it as the router as well, and the screen would
freeze for a couple of seconds whenever another machine on the
network started doing a large transfer.

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	
Vancouver, BC   (604) 257-9400		De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.