GigaRouter (Was Re: Cisco as Big Brother))

Sun Oct 20 22:06:33 UTC 1996

> as long as we're doing hardware design on the nanog list again, i'd like to
> mention that there's a little device that sits on an ISA bus and has an
> onboard PCIC (PCMCIA bus controller).  to this one attaches a pair of
> 50-pin ribbon cables, and to these one attaches a device that fits
> physically where a 3.5-inch floppy drive would fit (which means you
> generally need a 5.25-inch expansion mount, cost:$3.00).  the whole thing
> costs about $150.

Yep, got one here. I spent some time with OpenBSD trying to shoe-horn IDE
support in under the PCMCIA (PCcard) bus, with almost success. I will find anothe couple of spare days soon to finish it.

[...]
> caveats: 20MB isn't very large for a BSD system, even with shlibs -- you
> have to be highly selective about what you take; also, for /var/log it is
> probably a good idea to include a rotating magnetic media, unless you're
> going to use syslog's "remote log server" mode, which since it's UDP is not
> reliable enough for some forms of auditing that i've needed to design for.

If anyone want, I have made a <10Mb (not inc swap) distribution of
OpenBSD, but this coud well be any BSD, and it is working on our
routers fine. Inc gated.

Our plan is not to build routers with no moving parts - we prefer
redundancy or warm spares - but with a 260Mb IDE/PCMCIA drive in
the slot, it make for a great installation/configuration drive.

Regards,
-- 
Peter Galbavy                                           peter at wonderland.org
@ Home                                                 phone://44/973/499465
in Wonderland                              http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/