Re: [OT] Purchasing a wired switch; advice needed [question]

[PaulNM <Debian@paulscrap.com>]

Paul E Condon wrote:

> 
> Andrew,
> 
> I'm lurking here, looking to better understand a problem that I've never
> had to confront: NAT, I understand requires translation tables, one entry
> for each active tcp connection. This takes RAM. It also takes enough 
> CPU cycles to maintain this table --- set up new connections and find
> and delete old connections that are no longer in use. I can see a number
> of reasons why the old router would have to quit and need resetting.
> I wonder if one of the uplist suggestions which was to set up an old
> computer as a router might not work unless the hardware is powerful
> enough to keep up with the heavy maintenance activity on the NAT tables.
> Extra RMA also implies extra cpu cycles to find and remove old table
> entries. It might be that for this service, a somewhat heavy duty
> computer is needed. 
> 

The problem home router have with the nat tables isn't really due to cpu
utilization, but RAM usage.  Bittorrent is particularly an issue due to
the many, many, connections and packets it creates in a short period of
time.  Popular distro releases can quickly create a huge amount of
traffic since there are many people worldwide seeding them. This is
especially true immediately after a release.

An old PII or PIII era machine with 128 MB or more should be plenty to
handle the load.  Either use smoothwall, or something else like the x86
version of openwrt.

PaulNM