Hello Rowan_Crowe!

Friday April 10 1998 15:28, Rowan_Crowe wrote to All:

 RC > Hi everyone...been about a month since I tossed echomail, looks
 RC > like this area now has a wider distribution.

assuming you gett his you can add this node in sydney .. grim grin.

 RC > use OSPF internally between my routers, static routes to
 RC > Telstra, and BGP to AUIX (AUstralian Internet eXchange). OSPF
 RC > and BGP are both dynamic routing protocols. Using a routing

i am about to embark on a telstra direct account and would be interested to
hear how you 'mangled freebsd to cope with the way telstra does things.

also do you mknow that the main australian newsfeed computer is housed in
canberra and runs freebsd and is a i486dx33 with 16 or 24 meg of dram, last i
heard they were ging toreplace the scsi arrays with someting a bit more
relaible and upgrade the onboard memory to 32 mb.

 RC > A couple of days ago I received what could be called a
 RC > mainboard, except it's minute size. It's a 386sx40 with 4Mb RAM,
 RC > 2Mb flash "HD emulator", and onboard interfaces for twisted pair
 RC > ethernet, floppy disk, IDE HD, parallel port, COM1 and COM2.
 RC > Nothing unusual about it so far except perhaps the onboard
 RC > ethernet interface, but wait til you hear the size: it's
 RC > approximately 3.5" x 3.5"! The size of a 3.5" floppy disk.

for us old hands in the process control fraternity that not news, the really
hot stuff is a dual pentium pro setup on a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk footprint.
these also have small 'silicon' hard disks of about 32 or 64 mb, fully battery
backed. reliable enough to survive a direct nuclear strike, well not actually
ground zero, but ground zero pluss som two feet of remaining dirt well so goes
the hype .. and the cost as well. i forgot it also hass a data aqusition
circutry to multiplex upto some 2048 acquisition channels and send the results
up to 5 or so km by direct wire modem at some 430odd kbit (rs488 or rs43?). as
i;m not thierany more i don't keep as close an eye on these sorts of
developements as i once did. these things will run ms based operating systems
if thy have too .. they are designed for things like rtos, qnx lynx etc etc.

also rowan, take care with the mini you have it may not be what it seems to be.
those small footprint 'single board' computers are designed to live in a world
that is foreign to ms dos and such like. while the peripherals may look like
'normal' ibm pc buss peripheral, you had better find out what the buss really
is before you get all excited about building a cisco replacement.

 RC > Building a router using embedded PC technology will be more
 RC > expensive than just using a standard PC, but it will be far more
 RC > rugged and as a bonus it will be heaps smaller. About the size
 RC > of a VHS video cassette versus a standard PC desktop case...

might be cheaper to buy a cisco or a wellfleet ? or is this a cisco eat your
heart out sort of thing .. grin.

regards,

Jonathan

... i do what i can, with what i have, are you able to say the same ?

--- GoldED/386 3.00.Beta3+3022