In message <http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=117452881511952&w=1>,
Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty () porchlight ! ca> asked
> I've got a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram, ISA bus, with two drives: 840 MB
> and 1280 MB IDE.  Currently running Debian GNU/Linux Sarge.
> 
> Box has two uses:
> 
>         under normal cirumstance, as a thin client to my
>         athlon box elsewhere in the house.
> 
>         As a toolbox incase anything goes wrong with my new athlon, I
>         still can dial out to the net for help and downloads.
[[...]]
> Is there any reason that OpenBSD wouldn't be my best choice for this
> box?

OpenBSD would be fine for this -- I use a very similar system
(1995-vintage 486DX4-75 laptop with 32MB memory) as a home firewall.
It has 2 PCMCIA ISA-bus NICs, both ultra-cheap ne2000 clones (the
latest one bought a couple of months ago for 3 Euros (around US$4)
on Ebay).  One NIC talks to the DSL, the other to my home network.
The system has a new-in-2001 10GB disk, with loads of free space;
you should have no problem fitting a full OpenBSD install into either
one of your disks.

My firewall's main limitation is the poor performance of the ultra-cheap
ISA-bus NICs.  Right now it's limited to around 150-200K bytes/second
http/scp downloads even though my DSL will do 2-3 times that (checked
by hooking faster systems directly to the DSL).  I suspect that better
NICs would help, but I'm moving in a few months so I haven't bothered.

My only worry in the past has been how to install patches quickly,
since rebuilding from source is a bit slow (I typed 'make build' 2
days ago, and it's still running...).  I like Nick Holland's suggestion
<http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=117453369215436&w=1> of running
-current, and may try it on my firewall.

ciao,

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg (remove -animal to reply)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
   School of Mathematics, U of Southampton, England
   "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
    powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
                                      -- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam

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