Howdy again,
     
     I have been preparing to use my little IIcx as an IPNAT firewall and 
     connect it to my cable modem (wonderful toy, I highly recommend them).
       However, yesterday I discovered something that has made me worry 
     that the thing might not be able to keep up with network traffic.  
     
     I was just pinging around the local subnet and discovered that the 
     return times for each of the machines on the net was radically 
     different.  This wasn't a huge surprise since the hardware is all 
     radically different.  It did get me wondering though.
     
     Ping from Pentium 100 Linux Box w/ISA 10BaseT NIC
     
     yielded response times from:
     Pentium 200 w/PCI 10/100BaseT NIC (Win95)               of ~1.8ms
     PPC7100 w/internal AAUI (MacOS 8.1)                     of ~2.2ms 
     Mac IIcx w/10BaseT Nubus NIC  (MacBSD June-ish vintage) of ~6.8ms
     
     All cable lengths are the same and all are connected to the same hub.
     
     Does this slower response to a simple (simple-minded?) network test 
     imply that using it as IPNAT firewall would slow routing through the 
     cable modem?  The comparison is the Linux box which is doing really 
     well with IP Masq while carrying a full load. Would the MacBSD box 
     just be over-whelemed/under-used/just-right?
     
     Any thoughts?
     Eric Holcomb