Re: need firewall advice

[Stuart Marshall <marshall@sioux.llnl.gov>]

Hi,

In this case I actually want to get the full 100 BaseT 
bandwidth because the firewall is between our department
and the rest of our site.  The actual link to the internet
is quite high speed (much more than T1).  So the question
remains I think:  how much cpu power does it take to get
full 100 BaseT throughput?  Is is possible at all? I need
the bandwidth in both directions.

thanks,
Stuart

Quoting George Bonser (grep@shorelink.com):
> 
> The bottleneck will be the PCI interface, not the CPU. A P166 would be
> plenty. Going much higher than this really isn't going to buy you
> anything. If your connection to the internet is less than a DS3, a 486 can
> easilly saturate it. In other words, if all you have is a T1 to the
> internet, just about any PC will do the job. A 100MB NIC to the internet
> means nothing if the internet connection is a T1 on the other side of the
> router. You are never going to receive more than 193K Bytes/second on a
> T1.
> 
> If all you are doing is a firewall, Get a cheapo PC that works with Linux.
> Don't spend more than US$500 on it. Any more computer horsepower will not
> buy you a thing in throughput.
> 
> George Bonser
> 
> The Linux "We're never going out of business" sale at an FTP site near you!