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Date:      Sat, 2 May 1998 11:54:55 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Dan Busarow <dan@dpcsys.com>
To:        Jason <kib@poboxes.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD on old equipment
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.980502113426.269D-100000@java.dpcsys.com>
In-Reply-To: <004101bd75d7$db2b2c20$023aa8c0@kib.kib.net>

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On Sat, 2 May 1998, Jason wrote:
> I have a rash of older equipment here and wanted to know how compatible
> 2.2.5 or 2.2.6 is with older hardware and how well it will run if at all.  I
> have a rash of 386 boards with 2-16 megs of ram.  Will FreeBSD be of any use
> for on these sort of machines?  I already decided that the 286s won't work
> and need to hit the dump  :)

When I first looked at FreeBSD I installed 2.0.5 (I think) on a
386sx16 with 4meg and a 200M drive.  Command line stuff ran just
fine.  X ran but wasn't really usable :)  Somewhere around 2.1.0
the install required 5meg though the system would still run in
4.

I have a 486/33 with 4meg acting as a router for 3 subnets with
average daily throughput of ~ 600MB.  This is 2.1.0-RELEASE

trestles: [10] w
 1:12PM  up 136 days, 56 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

load averages:   0.14,  0.03,  0.01                                    13:13:38
16 processes:  1 running, 13 sleeping, 2 zombie
Cpu states:  0.8% user,  0.0% nice,  1.9% system,  2.7% interrupt, 94.6% idle
Memory: 828K Active, 412K Inact, 664K Wired, 48K Cache, 60K Free
Swap:   74M Total, 67M Free, 9% Inuse  64Kin  68Kout

I think if you go with a baseline of 8meg and a 200M drive you'll
be fine.  A really minimal install may be doable on a 100.

> I guess what I need to know is basic minimiums for FreeBSD.  I would like to
> run a Router that can IP alias for several machines over a Ethernet Internet
> connection.  Am I asking too much of this old hardware?

Go for it.  The small drives may be a problem but for just a router
you won't need to add any software over the minimal install.  Performance
wise, it wasn't really all that long ago that 386DX's were hot stuff
and routing doesn't do a whole lot of floating point :)

Dan
-- 
 Dan Busarow                                                  714 443 4172
 DPC Systems / Beach.Net                                    dan@dpcsys.com
 Dana Point, California  83 09 EF 59 E0 11 89 B4   8D 09 DB FD E1 DD 0C 82


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