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