On Tue, Apr 15, 2003 at 01:57:48PM +0200, Thomas Bohnert wrote:
> 
> > IMHO you shouldn't even consider using an ISA ethernet card in a system
> > that has a PCI bus.  The performance of the ISA bus is comparable to
> > that of the ethernet network.
> > Trying to use 3 cards will lead to packet loss.
> 
> You think it is not possible to use 3 cards concurrent? 
> My motherboard is an old asus p1s55... with 3 isa and 4 pci slots. If i'm not 
> misstaken, i need pci NICs to set my router ?
> 
For a long time I had a single 486 with _no_ PCI bus running three
NE2000s and two leased lines on the serial chips.  Only one network
was really active, the other two were connected to routers fed from
64kbps WAN links.

The machine was running NetBSD 1.3.x (I think) with IPF (thanks,
Darren) to do the most horrendous degree of firewalling and network
address translation.  It never complained.

I since upgraded it to slightly better hardware with a single D-Link
4-port 10/100 cards and the behaviour is indistinguishable.

I seem to recall the "firewall" had as little as 16Meg of RAM.

++L