On Sun, Sep 09, 2001 at 01:29:36AM -0400, Jason Boxman wrote: | On Sunday 09 September 2001 01:07 am, Nathan E Norman wrote: | > On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 09:42:34PM -0700, Craig Dickson wrote: | > > Nathan E Norman wrote: | <snip> | > | > I maintain (more or less) four boxes ... a celeron (my home machine), | > an athlon (my work desktop), a 486 (my firewall), and a p90 (a server | > with no portfolio). I compile all the kernels on the athlon because, | > well, it's just too painful to sit around waiting for the other | > machines to finish the job. The p90 and especially the 486 are | > practically useless while compiling a kernel. Since the athlon has | > the biggest (and fastest) disks, I need kernel-source trees on one | > machine rather than spread all over the place (let's see, I downloaded | > the ipsec patch where? Did I patch this tree, or was that the other | > box?) This is a significant advantage. | | I have a 486 firewall myself. My connectivity on other machines more or less | stops when I do things like run dpkg or the gShield firewall script | (iptables) loads on it. Is this normal, or is it just my particular 486 33?
I have a 486SX 25MHz with 8MB RAM (and ~32MB swap). When all I had was a dial-up connection it would take longer for dpkg to unpack the kernel than for the dialup link to download it. The reason is the system swaps a LOT because it needs quite a bit more memory than it has. I don't know what the gShield script does, but if it uses memory or disk a lot it is bound to be slow, or if it does a lot of computation. -D
