Re: [WinMac] Re: Win & Mac sharing a cable modem together

David Ross(d_ross[at]bellsouth.net)
Tue, 08 Feb 2000 13:38:44 -0500

> I started looking at MacSense's X-Router Internet Hub. It would provide the
> advantage of not needing to rely on one of my workhorse computers for
> routing purposes. A lot of people seem to be really pleased with it. I was
> surprised though, that one person on MacInTouch said IPNetRouter was
> _faster_ than X-Router. I would have expected a hardware solution to be
> faster than a software one. There were also some comments about weak
> security and limited port control with X-Router. Again, I would have
> expected the opposite, that a software router would be less secure.
> http://www.macintouch.com/accessrouters.html#xrouter

Hardware routers are computers also. The boot up and load programs
from ROM instead of a disk. They gain in speed from not having a real
OS most of the time but just some very primitive low level IO
routines. But on the other hand with web interfaces and such the
embedded OS is getting fancier all the time. CISCO's stuff has always
had their IOCS (?) system running which is one reason their stuff used
to cost so much more. It was really a specialized computer designed to
route packets. Now as to speed, a G4 running a Mac OS is likely to
have a lot more free cycles to route than a dedicated box running a
68K or 386 based router. So it depends on which computer your taking
about as to whether a hardware or software router is faster.

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Feb 08 2000 - 11:38:46 PST