Timothy Lillicrap wrote:
>
> I have a 486DX 66mhz which I am thinking of using as a firewall/gateway in a
> similar manor. Unfortunately I live in the country and have to use a dialup
> connection. At the moment I have a pentium 200 mhz which is serving as the
> firewall/gateway, but I would like to use it for something else as it seems a
> waste to use just for the gateway.
>
> I understand that there will always be some sort of overhead when using a
> firewall. My question is - will I notice a difference if I switch from a
> pentium 200 to a 486 66 as my gateway. I thought that because I am on dialup
> that I may not even notice the difference due to the fact that so little
> throughput is happening (4-5K a second).
>
> Could anyone tell me if I should expect to see a difference????
>
> thanks
>
> Timothy Lillicrap
>
> >
> > It is this rewriting of headers that consumes CPU time and actually
> > slows the system. While I get 1.1MB down with my DSL when a machine is
> > directly connected to the DSL modem, I find there is roughly a 20% lug
> > on speed when going through the 486SX firewall. Speed drops to 850 to
> > 900MB down behind the Linux firewall.
> >
> > Eventually I plan to upgrade to a Pentium firewall as the prices for
> > the 90MZ to 166MZ machines drops to near zero. PCI NIC's should also
> > help. However, there is always going to be overhead when running a
> > firewall. Protection does not come with zero cost.
> >
You won't notice a difference. I remember one little 486/66 box that
was doing routing for a LAN of 200 client computers. It was connected to
a T1. It's power supply gave out and we replaced it with a Pentium
75mhz, there was no difference in the network performance at all. None
of the users even knew we replaced it with a slightly faster machine. We
had more problems with our 3Com switches spontaneously dying and some of
the tempermental SGI Indigo 2's then we had with the little IPchains
box.
My favourite box for network routing though has got to be either a Sun
Sparc IPX or a Sun Sparc 2. Those old machines are glorious, they just
keep running and running. You can get them really cheap now, less then
$100 US and worth every penny. RedHat Linux runs very tight on them.
Good luck!
Toby A. Rider
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