given that a BSD/386 or NetBSD system can be put together quite cheaply and does a fine job at handling PPP and SLIP and multiple ethernets, this seems like a fine alternative to dedicated routers like Cisco for T1/E1-speed internet gateways. especially considering the power of GateD 3.5, and that a 16MB cisco can't handle a "full internet route table" while a 16MB i486 machine can do it easily.
The end of the last sentence is wrong (the start of the last sentence might be too, though I'm biased enough to maybe believe it). I know for a fact that, while gated's memory usage is not unreasonable, gated code does tend to resolve memory/CPU tradeoffs in favour of spending memory and saving CPU. And the per-route memory consumption in the Net/II kernel forwarding table is way out of line with what a decent router implementation should do. If you want your 486 box to compete with a 16MB cisco you really need to buy it a couple of extra rows of SIMMs. By the time you get enough neighbours and alternate paths in there to overwhelm a 16MB Cisco the 16MB 486 box will be spending most of its time trying to get large chunks of gated into and out of the page space, though a 32MB 486 box should still be pretty chipper. My (somewhat dated) observation is that i486 machines also seem to do a whole lot of work to get quite mediocre packet-per-second forwarding rates. On the other hand, if you buy it a good screen and interface card, the graphics are much better than even a 64MB Cisco. Dennis Ferguson