[plug] firewall computer - was Re: [plug] Has anyone else seen a flurry of Windows probes recently?

[Dion]

This is very true.  The uarts earlier than 16550 did not have deep 
enough buffers to manage modems from the advent of the 28.8K modems.  
Seeing as I have a pci modem with its own uart on the card this 
shouldn't be an issue. Speaking of which I will need at least a pentium 
class machine to have a pci slot to put it in.

Well it seems my question has been pretty thoroughly answered.  CPU and 
RAM aren't major issues as long as I can drive the modem at full speed.  
I think I have an old K6-III cpu/motherboard around here so I should be 
able to build a decent linux firewall from that.

Thanks to all for the comments.
D.


Matt Kemner wrote:

>On 26 Nov 2002, quoth William Kenworthy:
>
>  
>
>> I did dome c programming on serial
>>ports on a 16Mhz 386 under dos some (many) years ago and it only had a
>>effect when trying to run windoze (3.0!)  Mind you the modem was only a
>>14.4 ...
>>    
>>
>
>14.4 is (was) OK, but I found I was not able to get a useful connection
>at faster than ~19200 baud on my old 486 laptop (with 8250 UART)
>
>I remember when the first 28.8k modems came out, and the ISP[0] I was
>working at had a whole bunch of the add-on serial cards in stock (~$20
>each)  because many of our customers needed them when they upgraded to the
>faster modems.
>
> - Matt(getting all nostalgic now)
>
>[0] Networx (networx.net.au)
>
>
>
>  
>

-- 
"Never ascribe to malice that which may adequately be explained by incompetence." - Napoleon Bonaparte