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LINUX ROUTER WALL ART
It took 5 months to get my DSL line...the story of which i will
post soon, and during that time i collected a myriad of junk parts
from friends and donors so i could have a router when my line was
finally installed. I don't have any pictures of the first version,
which worked in testing, but for some reason died at the last second
before i mounted it. It wouldn't even load the bios...i think the
motherboard just ate it from being carried around in a box so much.
Here's the results. I ended up with a 5 port Linksys hub, a generic
486/33, generic 1 MB VGA card, 8 megs of ram, a power supply, and
a floppy controller card with 3.5" floppy drive all for free.
I had to purchase an ISA nic card for like $10 at Computer
Central cause no one seemed to have any despite many claims
that they should be easily attainable from garbage cans.
The router boots up off the floppy which contains a slightly modified
version of the Linux
Router Project opensource OS. The tiny Debian
and Minix
based OS is then loaded into ram, and any modifications can be saved
back to the floppy for the next reboot. So, in all actuallity, it
only needs the floppy for boot up, it runs sompletely solid state,
and given the stability of linux, i might just take the floppy off.
I could even add a hard drive and serve off this puppy.
I've got a Power Tower Pro 225 w/ MacOS 8.5.1and a Dual 350 PII
w/ NT hooked up through the router with 10BASE-T, and as soon as
i get a larger desk i'll have a Pentium 100 Linux box as well. The
DSL is 384kb/s to 1.5mb/s down and 128kb/s up. The performance is
supurb...barely noticible if at all that it's a shared connection
when both computers are in use...even when downloading large files.
Thank god for Ron Rebideau, without whom's linux expertise i couldn't
have gotten this thing up and running! Thanks man. I owe you some
beers or something.
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