Re: Firewall question
On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Bill said:
> Hi. I have a question about how powerful my firewall computer should
> be.
>
> I want to make a firewall for a small constellation of computers
> in my living room. Behind the firewall I will have two Win98 computers,
> one computer which boots Win98 or several flavors of Unix/Linux, and
> one Hurd box. This system will be entirely single user at any one
> time, though there may be different users. The network application
> will mostly be using VPN software to use Outlook and downloading
> source files through a CM system. Think of it as using CVS on a
> 1.0e6 line SW project, with 10 or so engineers making changes. I
> will need to fetch changed files from the internal network.
>
> I have an old 486DX120 machine which needs memory. I was planning
> to put 32Mb in it and letting it be the firewall. The two Win98
> machines are on one subnet, and one hub, and everything else is
> on a second hub and subnet, so the firewall box will handle
> routing between the two subnets. I need this to work this way for
> the VPN on the Win98 machines. The other machines are not involved
> in the VPN at all.
>
> Does this computer seem reasonably powerful?
>
Should be, I did a similar thing about a year ago with a 486DX66 and it seemed
to do the job without any real problems. I replaced it with a IBM/Cyrix 6x86
PR233 with 64M of ram and a small but adequate hd, built from cheap parts and
"junk" parts (total cost was about $175), running a web cache as well. I
probably could have run squid on the 486, but as I was going to change the hd
anyway, I saw no reason not to build the new machine.
-ptw-
Reply to: