Anyone have experience with PicoBSD?

[jkersenbr]

I have a router running PicoBSD. It's a single-disk BSD, although I have the image written on a hard drive so it reboots faster. It is routing high-speed wireless internet to my LAN, and my ISP provided the PicoBSD disk.

Anyway, BSD is extrememly unstable in this task. I first gave it a 3c509 NIC and after a couple hours all routing would stop and pings resluted in a "no buffer space available".

So I put in an NE2000 compatible card. Now I get "stray irq 7's" and the driver for the wireless receiver card crashes. I've moved slots and even tried 2 different mobos and have the same irq problem.

BSD does not impress me. A router should not have to be rebooted daily. I'm running quality hardware too. Pentium Pro 180/Intel FX chipset/Parity memory with ECC enabled.

There is a linux driver for my wireless card (a Teletronics WL2400); perhaps I'll try linux, but I'll be completely on my own because my ISP only wants to support this pathetic implementation of BSD.

Any ideas?

 

[jhu]

wow, that's interesting that your isp actually supports picobsd. i'd try it but pppoe isn't included yet. other options you might want to try are linux router or freesco

 

[jkersenbr]

I love Freesco; if only it would work...

Neither LRP or Freesco have driver support for my wireless card. There are linux drivers avilalble, but they are .RPM's for RedHat or Mandrake. (If I try it I'm gonna do Mandrake).

 

[jhu]

do you have a linux installation on your main computer? you might be able to get the sources and compile it for freesco or lrp

 

[goldboyd]

why dont you try a real bsd, such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD?

 

[Supergax]

Yes, as Goldboyd said, a more popular BSD build should not give you any problems.

 

[cureless]

Did you do any troubleshooting to the PicoBSD? I've met some of the main developers and they seem to know what they are doing. They are part of the "normal" BSD developers too. You might want to try to contact them.

Also, have you tried the "official" PicoBSD distro as opposed to the one given to you by your ISP?

If you have a real HD I would recommend one of the "big" BSDs. I run FreeBSD on my firewall/router and so far it's great (486 SLC with a flaky EISA video board). It's been up 75~ days, since the last rolling-blackout (California).

You can also go with Linux, in that case go with something like debian. The mini-distros are Ok, but a complete (yet not overloaded for a router) distro has a lot of advantages. (I guess Slackware could also do the job)

The HD space lets you have a lot of goodies as well as do some logging etc.

 

[fivepesos]

man, wireless lan support for linux and bsd isnt that great. what card and what service, tell us some more about your network setup. im more concerened with support for your wireless adapter than your nics (we can get those working pretty easy with linux). give us some more detail on the service and hardware you intend to use.

no experience with picoBSD or that much BSD, but if you decide to try linux there will probably be lots of good solutions and help (better than what your isp could provide probably). how much experience do you have with linux?

id recommend trying to get those wireless drivers you mentioned working under linux. i looked at your rigs and your router has no hard drive. do you have an old one you could use, itd be easier than trying to configure wireless drivers on a mini-distro?

your 486 can probably handle a no-bloat distro like debian or slackware. if you havent done this on linux before its realy easy. read the ip-masq howto (www.ldp.org if you can find it anywhere else). im currently in the process of upgrading my router to suse or slackware. let us know what you decide and we can try and help you out man.

 

[jkersenbr]

I've given up on the 486 router in my system rigs. I'm starting over with a Pentium Pro. The 486 is just too unstable.

A Google search indicates that my original "no buffer space avialable" problem occurs primarily when the network is really too fast for the routing computer. My entire network is 100BaseTX except for the router which is 10BaseT (there are only PCI slots in the 486) and I use a switch. I'm changing to the Pentium Pro so I can have a PCI slot for a 100Mb NIC.

I'm not worried about making my NIC's work. I'm not scared of Linux, I have worked with serveral Linux systems (although only RedHat and Mandrake). Including my file/print server which is running Mandrake 7.1 on 94 days uptime. And it is just a junky cacheless Celeron 300 on some no name (AZZA) mobo I got on e-bay for $8. Not exactly high-performance, server-grade hardware, but Linux likes it. I don't see why BSD is choking on everything I throw at it.

I have a 104MB hard drive currently with the PicoBSD image. I have a 4.3GB I could take out of another machine and use for this job.

I will be using a Teletronics WL2400 802.11 PCcard in an ISA adapter. I have no other choice. My ISP provides it as part of my subscription to the service. My ISP also provides the PicoBSD router software. Anything else I choose to do I'm on my own. Heck, I'd even do WindowsNT if there was a good free Proxy for it. (Something that will handle everything - like ICQ in addition to HTTP, POP, and FTP.) The teletronics card has drivers ready for BSD and RedHat/Mandrake (they recommend Mandrake) Linux. While I'm sure the Linux software could be compiled for Debian or Slackware, Teletronics only supports Mandrake.

I've tried something that seems to be working (for now). I assigned the Teletronics card IRQ7. I suppose now a different stray will pop up, but I haven't seen it yet.

Thanks for the ideas. I'm not going to do a full BSD. If I'm doing a full install, it will be Mandrake Linux.