Evaluation of a Pentium PC for use as an Ethernet Bridge

This technical report describes the construction of an inexpensive Ethernet Bridge built from an obsolete Pentium PC (IBM PC 300GL Pentium 166MMX ) and Ethernet cards. The report outlines a simple procedure for estimating the latency of the bridge. Results are presented for the timestamping accuracy of the bridge, the average latency and FreeBSD ping characteristics. The bridge can be used as a traffic shaper by installing FreeBSD's dummynet module.