LF laptop for IPCOP firewall

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 06:43:14AM -0400, John Van Ostrand wrote:
> Why two identical NICs? Shouldn't you be able to use the on-board NIC
> (if it has one) and any other Linux supported PCMCIA or USB?

A 486 laptop would almost certainly not have built in networking.  Back
then there were too many network types in use, so you never knew what
the user would want.  Could be Token ring (4 or 16Mbit versions, with
any of the possible connector types), could be 10BaseT, 10Base2 10Base5,
100BaseTX, 100BaseT4, etc.  Hard to build all those in to the laptop, so
pcmcia it was.

Finding two pcmcia cards that will fit in at the same time could be
tricky for a 486, since you have to get pcmcia cards, not cardbus cards
(it won't run those).  If you want cards with solid build in connectors,
you would have to find the type where two cards wrap their connectors
side by side (I forget the name of the company that made those.  It was
bought by intel at some point), or you could use the cards with dongles,
and hope they don't break (3c575 as far as I recall was popular for
those).

A built in CD-ROM is also unlikely on that level of machine.

--
Len Sorensen
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