Firewall/Masquerading performance

Hello,

Here at the office I am thinking of kicking the current cisco router out
of the window after 10 years. We have a 10 MBit line and need a good
firewall/router/masquerader to get access to the net.

Wil a 2400MHz xeon with 1 gig memory and scsi discs be enough to route
500 employees using OSPF?

Thanks
ramses

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Ramses v. Pinxteren wrote:
| Hello,
|
| Here at the office I am thinking of kicking the current cisco router out
| of the window after 10 years. We have a 10 MBit line and need a good
| firewall/router/masquerader to get access to the net.
|
| Wil a 2400MHz xeon with 1 gig memory and scsi discs be enough to route
| 500 employees using OSPF?
|
| Thanks
| ramses

considering some (most) Cisco Carrier/ISP routers, Cisco PIX's, etc dont
have that much horsepower, i think you are OK with that machine. unless
you have 150,000 OSPF routes? ;-)

- --

Marco Benton - BOFH, BSMFH
Network Consultant

BOFH excuse #294: The cause of the problem is: The Token fell out of the
ring. Call us when you find it.

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> Here at the office I am thinking of kicking the current cisco router out
> of the window after 10 years. We have a 10 MBit line and need a good
> firewall/router/masquerader to get access to the net.

I would have thrown the cisco box out the window after about year 2 or 3
(that's when I started with linux).

> Wil a 2400MHz xeon with 1 gig memory and scsi discs be enough to route 500
> employees using OSPF?

nope. That's way too much machine for that little bit of data. Try scaling
down to about a PII or maybe a PIII if you are really worried. Put no more
than 256M Ram in it and a HD no bigger than 4 Gig.

Boxes like that go all the time on ebay for $50.

Then stick on your fav distro (mine is slack), don't install X, you won't be
needing it. Unless you are using X to just open a console, and then what
was the sense in it, eh?

After you have all your network running do top and you'll see it never goes
over 5% even on peak.

Now if you do decide to use a huge machine, donate those spare cpu cycles to
something like distributed.net. Otherwise you're just wasting your money.