[MLB-WIRELESS] Re: Small Systems was BIPAC-743: ADSL, 802.11b, 4xEthernet

[Jason Hecker]

Yo,

> I did a show and tell of my OpenAP system at the last meeting.  Yes, the

This I saw and was very impressed.  It's a shame all APs are like it 
(though you wouldn't get them for $140 then).

> this chip (AMD ELAN SC400) is a 486 clone - but it doesn't have an mmu
> either.  The distribution turns on the old mmu emulation from the 386SX
> days.

Heh, no MMU.  Fair enough.  Having no MMU though is fine, you just have to
be acutely aware that any code you run on it has the potential to kill the
system if such things as bad pointers or stack overflows occur.  A recent
discussion on the NetBSD mailing lists had people wanting MMUless support
in the main branch, which is possible, but there is a certain amount of
resistance from the NetBSD community - which is a shame.  I get the
feeling most programmers these days don't want the worry of bad pointers
and stack overflows killing the system.  Better to have an MMU to keep
everything in order and safe.  I'll be a tad cynical here and say MMU's
make a programmer lazy... there is no incentive to make sure your program
doesn't exceed it's memory bounds - cosmic rays flipping address bits
aside.  Though if anyone is old enough, the Amiga didn't have an MMU nor
do older Macs (pre OS-X from what I can tell), and the amount of times
these machines would crash gives you some idea how useful an MMU is...  
are we still awake, kiddies?

A bulk buy of the Soekris boards could be good.  It might be worth holding 
out for the beefier newer models due soon.  Nevertheless, these are 
exactly the sorts of boards you want as an AP, especially if you want it 
up a mast and acting as a firewall, router, OSPF doohickey and encryptor 
of packets and maybe token webserver.

-- 
Cheers,
jASON
---------------------------------------------
--== http://www.wireless.org.au/~jhecker ==--
---------------------------------------------



To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo at wireless.org.au
with "unsubscribe melbwireless" in the body of the message