PowerMac 5400 as server/gateway?

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 7:05 PM -0700 6/4/02, Jay Savage wrote:

>My question is: how suitable would this machine be as a gateway and
>experimetal web/mailserver?  It only has 10BaseT (and maybe AAUI as
>well?),

I'm pretty sure that machine has only one Ethernet MAC (medium access 
controller), so even if you have both ports, you can only use one at 
a time.

That could present a problem if you want to use it as a gateway: the 
best gateway setups use one network interface for the outside world 
and another for the internal network.  I'm not sure, but I don't 
think that the 5400 has any slots available for adding a second NIC.

>but since my DSL is only 768k downstream and 128k upstream, it
>doesn't seem like bandwidth is an issue, and the rest of my network behind
>it will still run through the 10/100 hub (or 10/65, as the case may be--
>it's linksys ;-} )  And while the machine isn't fast, especially with that
>603e chip, if I max out the ram and drop in the L1 cache, it's shouldn't
>be *too* bad.

I use a PowerBook 2400 as a gateway/firewall with 1.5 Mbps downstream 
cable.  It has a 180 MHz 603e, 256KB (I think) L2 cache, and 80 MB of 
RAM.  Performance is fine.  In fact, processor load during peak 
traffic is almost nil.  The Linux kernel's network stack is pretty 
efficient.

>i'm also interested in experimenting with it as a webser and possibly mail
>server, and--since my server experience is basically limited to OS9
>websharing and a small ftp server based no directions from this list--I'm
>not sure how much processor time and RAM those operations use.

Depends on how many hits the server is expected to process.  For 
light duty use, a machine in the 5400's class should be OK.
-- 
Tim Seufert