On Saturday 01 May 2004 07:38, Hans du Plooy wrote:

Hi all,

I have a 486 DX2-66 with 16mb RAM that I'd like to use as a firewall for dial-up at home. Network card is a 10-base ISA card, it has a vesa-localbus IDE controller and 1gb Maxtor disc. The disc was from a P-I of which the mobo went bad. The firewall was already setup with forwarding and squid proxy on the disc.

I tried it once but the result was disappointing. I could not get anymore than about 1kbps download speed, and response was really slow. Even with the proxy and all other unnecessary services disabled, matters didn't improve. I tried both SuSE 6.3 and the latest IP-COP (www.ipcop.org) with all the patches loaded.

The modem (external serial 56k v90) works fine and at full speed directly on my computer, so it's not that. I copy a large file - about 40mb - with scp to the 486, and it went at about 120kbps. Not sure where the bottleneck there is - hard disc write speed or network card - but at least I know networking should be able to keep up.

Is a machine like this just too slow? Or is the RAM insufficient? It only serves two clients on normal analog dialup.

Thanks Hans

Does it have a "Turbo" switch and is it "on"? I'd say you need more RAM if it'll take it. In theory that machine should work for a firewall. I'd suggest one of the extremely light weight Linux distributions or the firewall-on-a-floppy distributions that still support 486s. Stan

Hi all,

I have a 486 DX2-66 with 16mb RAM that I'd like to use as a firewall for dial-up at home. Network card is a 10-base ISA card, it has a vesa- localbus IDE controller and 1gb Maxtor disc. The disc was from a P-I of which the mobo went bad. The firewall was already setup with forwarding and squid proxy on the disc.

I tried it once but the result was disappointing. I could not get anymore than about 1kbps download speed, and response was really slow. Even with the proxy and all other unnecessary services disabled, matters didn't improve. I tried both SuSE 6.3 and the latest IP-COP (www.ipcop.org) with all the patches loaded.

The modem (external serial 56k v90) works fine and at full speed directly on my computer, so it's not that. I copy a large file - about 40mb - with scp to the 486, and it went at about 120kbps. Not sure where the bottleneck there is - hard disc write speed or network card - but at least I know networking should be able to keep up.

Is a machine like this just too slow? Or is the RAM insufficient? It only serves two clients on normal analog dialup.

Thanks Hans

Hi Hans, Squid might be the problem which slows the machine down with this low amount of RAM. Till last year I ran a Box like yours (486/100, 16MB RAM) as Firewall connecting my LAN to DSL (786k/s) and I had no speed-problem at all - even during the 12 hours it needed to compile a new kernel. At that time I used Redhat with a 2.2.x kernel - but I'm sure the newest 486-capable-SuSE distribution (7.3 ???) without X should make it, too I never used Squid on that box - so maybe that's the point. Cheers, Oliver Kellermann

* Hans du Plooy (Sat, May 01, 2004 at 02:38:02PM +0200)

Hi all,

I have a 486 DX2-66 with 16mb RAM that I'd like to use as a firewall for dial-up at home. Network card is a 10-base ISA card, it has a vesa-localbus IDE controller and 1gb Maxtor disc. The disc was from a P-I of which the mobo went bad. The firewall was already setup with forwarding and squid proxy on the disc.

I used to have a 386 w/ 8m of ram as a firewall for an entire office (20+ users over a dual ISDN line) It ran a Suse 6.4 (? I think) and whatever the 2.0 version of iptables/iptraf was , including full masquerading, automatic dial up and everything.

I tried it once but the result was disappointing. I could not get anymore than about 1kbps download speed, and response was really slow. Even with the proxy and all other unnecessary services disabled, matters didn't improve. I tried both SuSE 6.3 and the latest IP-COP (www.ipcop.org) with all the patches loaded.

I wopuld very strongly recommend to *NOT* run squid on the box. Only use it as a firewall and nothing else (well, OK, you might run DNS or similar on it)

Is a machine like this just too slow? Or is the RAM insufficient? It only serves two clients on normal analog dialup.

I suspect squid. Kind regards, -- Gerhard den Hollander Phone :+31-10.280.1515 ICT manager Direct:+31-10.280.1539 Fugro-Jason Fax :+31-10.280.1511 gdenhollander@Fugro-Jason.com POBox 1573 visit us at http://www.Fugro-Jason.com 3000 BN Rotterdam JASON.......#1 in Reservoir Characterization The Netherlands This e-mail and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the addressee. This e-mail shall not be deemed binding unless confirmed in writing. If you have received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to anyone. Please note that any views or opinions presented in this e-mail are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the company. E-mail transmission cannot be guaranteed to be secure or error-free. The sender therefore does not accept liability for any errors or omissions in the contents of this message, which arise as a result of e-mail transmission.

likely its 30 pin memory. I have a few 1 meg 30 pin someplace not enough to do you any good. Try the local swap meet or ebay. Some antique dealer might have some if there not made into jewlery. CWSIV On Fri, 7 May 2004 22:48:16 +0200 Hans du Plooy writes:

On Wednesday 05 May 2004 07:12, Felix Miata wrote:

...

EDO came long after Pentiums, so I doubt any 486's know anything about it. You need FPM, the standard 72 pin prior to EDO.

Are there more than one type of 72-pin SIMMs? These are 72-pin, workes fine in a Pentium, but the 486 won't have it.

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