To: Greg from Edmonton who wrote (11020 ) 7/3/2000 1:00:07 AM From: Greg from Edmonton Respond to Aha! I think I found it again, I've dug up a few tidbits that I've found extremely useful to share. The reason for my researching this stuff is to hopefully implement a firewall / gateway machine using Linux on a 66MHz 486 machine. Because DSL or cable is unavailable in my area, I have also been researching which is the best 56k modem to get (my current connection is 28.8k and due for an upgrade). According to the talk at 56k.com the clear winner seems to be the (Diamond) SupraExpress. Enough rambling about modems already, here's the goods on the rest:linux.org If you can already send and receive back-to-back packets, you just can't put more bits over the wire. Every modern ethercard can receive back-to-back packets. The Linux DP8390 drivers (wd80x3, SMC-Ultra, 3c503, ne2000, etc) come pretty close to sending back-to-back packets (depending on the current interrupt latency) and the 3c509 and AT1500 hardware have no problem at all automatically sending back-to-back packets.The ISA bus can do 5.3MB/sec (42Mb/sec), which sounds like more than enough for 10Mbps ethernet. In the case of the 100Mbps cards, you clearly need a faster bus to take advantage of the network bandwidth. linux.org A 486/66 box with 16MB of RAM was more than sufficient to fill a 1.54Mb/s T1 100%! linux.org Also, many people use IP MASQ for TELNET, FTP, etc. *AND* also setup a caching proxy on the same Linux box for WWW traffic for the additional performance. A 100Mbps card shouldn't be really necessary until you are dealing with at least a full T3 (44.7Mbps) or OC-1 (51.8Mbps) connection .
