Re: PII fast enough for firewall

[David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu>]

On Dec 2, 2007, at 8:22 PM, John Schmidt wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a 15K Mbs connection (up/down) to my house (fiber to the home).
>
> I have a Buffalo router that connects to my WAN and then one of the  
> LAN ports
> on this router connects to my IPCOP firewall that is running on a  
> PII -- 400
> MHz box with 64 MB of RAM.
>
> When I do a speed test from my box behind my IPCOP firewall, I get  
> about 10K
> Mbs up/down.
>
> If I move the connection to one of the Buffalo router LAN  
> connections, I get
> the advertised 15K Mbs up/down speed.
>
> So routing traffic thru the IPCOP firewall slows things down quite  
> a bit.  Is
> this to be expected?

Run 'top' on the firewall while you do your speed test.  Look at the  
idle percentage.  If you've still got idle CPU time, the problem is  
elsewhere.

Dumb question: This machine *does* have a 100baseT NIC, right?  If  
it's got an old 10baseT NIC, that might explain things...