Stephen Stafford wrote:
While I support the removal of 386 support, I absolutely and strenuously object to going to 686. 686 isn't all that old at all (1997 IIRC), and I use a nunber of 4/586 machines still (I have one 486 which I use for embedded development and 3 P100 boxen which are used for various things like CVS server, gateway/firewall, testing various things).
Judging from my random contacts with users, it's a fairly usual setup to see a network of higher (500Mhz+) end hardware machines which sit on a LAN in 1918space and are masqueraded to the outside internet by a firewall/gateway running Debian on a 486 or low end pentium. I believe this to be a fairly significant proportion of our userbase and I'd oppose any move to marginalise them like this.
You will upgrade these router to sarge o newer distributions? i think removal of some 486sx will have some advantages (removal of software floating point support in kernels/disks..
ciao giacomo