Using Debian as a Broadband Router
As the subject implies - I just got introduced to the world of
high-speed internet. It's amazing what a T-1 can do.
Being at least somewhat concerned about security, I felt we needed to
implement a firewall between our pristine LAN and the horrible nasty
germ-ridden world. Being short of funds - I'm trying to accomplish this
without spending money!
Using Sid/Sarge/Woody - depends on the time of day and what I felt like
playing around with at the time - I've implemented a packet filter and
NAT routing using IPTABLES.
And amazingly enough (since I'm the one doing this) - it works! And it
works reliably - at least to provide access for my network, I haven't
tried hacking in yet!
My question is one of performance - I've got 1.5M T-1, and I know I'm
not getting the full use of that bandwidth. CNET's bandwith meter tests
at about 500k-800k.
The equipment:
Cabling: Cat-6.
Server: Pentium III, 450mhz, 768M RAM. 1 Intel network adapter
and 1 Netgear network adapter.
Network switch: Netgear 8-port switch.
All the cards and switch are supposed to be 10/100 full-duplex,
which means I'm supposed to have 200M connections. Right?
Watching the CPU load, I can see a lot of processing going on during
internet activity. Besides trying to reduce the active services running
on the server (like X-Windows), what can I do to optimize this? Do I
need to replace the server network cards?
Daniel
Reply to: