17 Jun
2016
17 Jun
'16
5:36 p.m.
On Thu, 2 Jun 2016, Sean Caron wrote:
Oh, man, that brings back memories. Trying to bang
Linux onto a 386SX-16 with
4 Meg RAM and some puny little hard drive ... My first NAT box! It was pretty
excruciating to use, LOL. I bet the throughput could be figured in kpps... ;)
I had an experimental early Linux Ethernet bridge installation on a
386SX-16 PC with 2MB of RAM IIRC and 5 NE2000 clones (as many as there
were ISA slots left after filling in an HGC adapter for the console and a
multi-I/O adapter for the hard disk), driving a network of some 200 PCs.
The (non-mainline-Linux yet) bridge module was a bit too experimental
back then in that it didn't do MAC address ageing/purging, which drove
people angry as they sometimes moved their PCs between network segments
and lost connectivity to other segments. The advantage however was the
bridge didn't lock up, unlike DOS `kbridge' software previously used,
which did it frequently, driving even more people angry.
Somewhat unexpectedly bridging performed very smoothly, however the load
from frame passing between the primitive NE2000
interfaces was so high
that there was a multiple-second console echo latency
observed when typing
characters!
Maciej