>-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of >[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 8:27 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: (no subject) > > >The concept that "netgraph hooks" are a "leg up" on say, ETs drivers that >have integrated bandwidth management and prioritization, WAN bridging >support, load balancing and a probably 25% performance advantage is a bit >entertaining. Unless you need to do some convoluted encapsulation netgraph >is, aside from being appallingly non-standard to anything else in >the market, > not much of an "advantage", and its a poster child for the trade off of >"flexibility" versus performance. > >Lets face it. If you were going to sit down and design an interface >for frame >relay, multi-protocol support, etc, you'd have to be smoking >something pretty >strong to come up with netgraph. But its free and there is source, so it >must be great! >
Well, let me give you something else to put in your pipe and smoke. :-) I've spent about $800 on a few WANic 4xx cards (used, I'll grant) precisely because source for the driver is available. I happen to not use them with Frame circuits so I used the HDLC in the driver. I have spent $0.00 on ET cards precisely because the driver code is unavailable. Now, as I've never used ET cards, I'll take your statement at face value that their drivers are superior to the WANic one. But, I'm not going to pick a superior binary-only driver over an inferior source-freely-available driver, if I have a choice. You may think this is screwy but it's how I feel. I'm glad that ET is out there selling cards to the FreeBSD community but I wouldn't spend money on them as long as a source-freely-available alternative was around. Ted Mittelstaedt [EMAIL PROTECTED] Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
