Re: CPU speed for Linux Firewall/NAT solution

From: Skylar Thompson (skylar_at_quark.cs.earlham.edu)
Date: 06/18/03 

Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 13:26:41 GMT

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 06:08:23 GMT, Wolf <temp7@thewolfden.org> wrote:
> Can anyone provide guidlines on what CPU speeds are necessary for a
> robust Linux Firewall/NAT solution for a 2MBps cable connection?
>
> I want to make sure the CPU is not so slow it ends up slowing down the
> connection or dropping packets or something, especially for the incoming
> connections.

I've got a 133MHz 486 with 32MB of RAM running NetBSD that does a good job
as a firewall/NAT gateway on our 768kbps/384kbps cable connection. The only
problem I've run into is a lack of network memory buffer space, which I
solved by bumping the number of NBUFs from 1k to 32k. NAT'ing is not CPU
intensive at all; the machine is hardly ever at over 20% CPU utilization. 

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar@cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/

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