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Date:      Thu, 29 Nov 2001 04:15:21 -0800
From:      "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
To:        <Nyteckjobs@aol.com>, <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: (no subject)
Message-ID:  <000e01c178cf$844d33e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
In-Reply-To: <14e.4d05ff7.29371325@aol.com>

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>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of
>Nyteckjobs@aol.com
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 8:27 PM
>To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
>Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG; tedm@toybox.placo.com
>Subject: (no subject)
>
>
>The concept that "netgraph hooks" are a "leg up" on say, ETs drivers that
>have integrated bandwidth management and prioritization, WAN bridging
>support, load balancing and a probably 25% performance advantage is a bit
>entertaining. Unless you need to do some convoluted encapsulation netgraph
>is, aside from being appallingly non-standard to anything else in
>the market,
> not much of an "advantage", and its a poster child for the trade off of
>"flexibility" versus performance.
>
>Lets face it. If you were going to sit down and design an interface
>for frame
>relay, multi-protocol support, etc, you'd have to be smoking
>something pretty
>strong to come up with netgraph.  But its free and there is source, so it
>must be great!
>

Well, let me give you something else to put in your pipe and smoke. :-)

I've spent about $800 on a few WANic 4xx cards (used, I'll grant) precisely
because
source for the driver is available.  I happen to not use them with Frame
circuits so
I used the HDLC in the driver.

I have spent $0.00 on ET cards precisely because the driver code is
unavailable.

Now, as I've never used ET cards, I'll take your statement at face value that
their drivers are superior to the WANic one.

But, I'm not going to pick a superior binary-only driver over an inferior
source-freely-available driver, if I have a choice.  You may think this is
screwy but it's how I feel.

I'm glad that ET is out there selling cards to the FreeBSD community but I
wouldn't spend money on them as long as a source-freely-available alternative
was around.


Ted Mittelstaedt                                       tedm@toybox.placo.com
Author of:                           The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
Book website:                          http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com




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