>Topic:  can an oldish PeeCee with a bunch of ISA ne2000s route with any real
>throughput? 
>...
>Ok so how about if we were talking about a Pentium 75Mhz-120Mhz, with PCI
>cards instead of ISA?  Would this help?  Is it still a bad idea?

To give you a little data .... I have the following machines:

P: 266 mhz pentium, isa ne2000 clone

N: 486/66, 2 ne2000 clones, scsi disks

S: 486/66, ne2000 clone, ide disk

D: 200 mhz pentium pro, isa ne2000 and intel 100 mb ether, scsi disk

W: 200 mhz pentium pro, intel 100 mhz ether, ide disk

All run NetBSD, N & S are at 1.2, others at 1.3.

Config:

---10 Mb ether -------N-------P---------D---------
                      |                 |
                      |                 |
                     10 Mb             100 Mb
                      |                 |
                      |                 |
                      S                 W

So N and D are the gateways.

Timings taken are as follows (from ftp)

P -> N, 6 Mb file, 560 KB/sec
P -> N -> S, 6 Mb file, 474 KB/sec

P -> D, 6 Mb file, 862 KB/sec
P -> D -> W, 6 mb file, 787 KB/sec

D -> W, 6 Mb file, 2.42 MB/sec

This is far from a conclusive study, but I have found that N has worked just fine
as a gateway for the last 3 years as well as a nice WWW server!

The newer machines are indeed faster and should give you better performance.
But the older ones do work.  Notice, network speed can also change your
performance!

-- 
Phil Nelson                    NetBSD: http://www.netbsd.org
e-mail: phil@cs.wwu.edu        !gifs: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
http://www.cs.wwu.edu/~phil