DescentBB

Okay, I got really bored last night, so I took a couple of pics from my broadband router.

Behold! Worship the raw computational power of this beast! It's a 486 running a low-profile linux distro with basically only NAT and routing in the kernel. There's no harddrive (well there is, but it's not connected), it just boots from floppy. It used to have 4MB ram but *drumroll* I upgraded it to 8MB!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the IBM PS/1!

<img src=http://tricord.cjb.net/router/router01.jpg>

<img src=http://tricord.cjb.net/router/router02.jpg>

<img src=http://tricord.cjb.net/router/router03.jpg>

<img src=http://tricord.cjb.net/router/router04.jpg>

<img src=http://tricord.cjb.net/router/router05.jpg>

It actually performs like a dream. I slapped in an ISA 56k modem, so it's actually a one user RAS for dial-in. There are two huge-arse ISA NICs, you know those with ten thousand jumpers where you have to configure IO and IRQ manually. It acts as DNS server/gateway, DHCP server, router with NAT and portforwarding. When I took this machine from a dusty shelf in the basement of it's previous owners, nobody ever would have thought that this machine would be running 24/7 for over three years serving my home network and handling many gigabytes of transfer. Speeds are great, too! I get about 500k/sec after which my ISA bus is saturated

sup Trichord!

Freesco ownz... actually you telling Vertigo about it and then him telling me about it started my addiction to Linux.. I was amazed at the unbelievable increase in network performance when going from a Win2k router to a Freesco router.. the security improvements are more than I can type in the amount of time I have...

But alas, I had to upgrade. I ended up going with a P2/450 running a late-distro of Linux with IPTables. The stateful packet filtering of IPTables was too good to pass up.

But I believe I ultimately owe my Linux addiction to you telling Vertigo about it and then him telling me... today (after 1.5 years of learning ), I use Linux as my sole OS both here at work and at home... it's such a wondeful world..

haha, I love the ASCII Tux.

if you want some nostalgia, I'll find my old Commodore 64 and play Defender... Now that was a quality game!

Hey Tri want to overclock that baby I was looking through an old box of parts the other day and found this.

Damn Tri, I haven't had to mess with one of those for a couple of years. Still, thats kinda cool that you got that thing to run like that. Matter of fact, I've got an old PS/2 keyboard (not to be confused with PS2) and mouse in the other room just sitting there gathering dust.