Small format factor 486-PI/PII needed for ipcop firewall

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Mon Feb 12 16:48:55 UTC 2007


On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 11:21:28AM -0500, Colin McGregor wrote:
> I have seen some very small '486 PCs aimed at the POS
> (point of sale) market (i.e. smart cash registers).
> But there is another issue with '486 boxes namely
> ALMOST none of the '486 boxes had PCI slots (yes, I
> did see a few of the last '486 boxes (i.e. 100/120 MHz
> boxes) with PCI, but they were RARE). The lack of PCI
> means you are basically limited to ISA bus and ALMOST
> none of the ISA bus cards support 100 mbps ethernet
> (yes, 3com did make one 100 mbps ISA card, but now we
> are talking extremely exotic). Further in many cases
> you are talking trouble with installing 2 ISA ethernet
> cards in the same box... 

Most 486's with PCI were probably PCI 1.0, which probably doesn't work
with most modern cards (not sure it had 3.3V at all, and I am not sure
the auto configuration works quite the same).

> Bottom line, going to a '486 is more of a nightmare
> than I would take on by choice. These days Pentium II
> PCs are in the "garbage PC" class, (i.e.: hunt around
> a bit and you can find them being put out with the
> trash), and with the PCI bus are a LOT less pain to
> deal with, and would be my pick for a custom
> firewall...

Certainly a small P2/P3 system can be had used for $100 or so.  And it
would have PCI 2.0 or 2.1, and usually 128MB ram (which would likely be
more than the max ram possible on the 486 system).

--
Len Sorensen
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