Hi all,
I have a 486 DX2-66 with 16mb RAM that I'd like to use as a firewall for dial-up at home. Network card is a 10-base ISA card, it has a vesa- localbus IDE controller and 1gb Maxtor disc. The disc was from a P-I of which the mobo went bad. The firewall was already setup with forwarding and squid proxy on the disc.
I tried it once but the result was disappointing. I could not get anymore than about 1kbps download speed, and response was really slow. Even with the proxy and all other unnecessary services disabled, matters didn't improve. I tried both SuSE 6.3 and the latest IP-COP (www.ipcop.org) with all the patches loaded.
The modem (external serial 56k v90) works fine and at full speed directly on my computer, so it's not that. I copy a large file - about 40mb - with scp to the 486, and it went at about 120kbps. Not sure where the bottleneck there is - hard disc write speed or network card - but at least I know networking should be able to keep up.
Is a machine like this just too slow? Or is the RAM insufficient? It only serves two clients on normal analog dialup.
Thanks Hans
Hi Hans, Squid might be the problem which slows the machine down with this low amount of RAM. Till last year I ran a Box like yours (486/100, 16MB RAM) as Firewall connecting my LAN to DSL (786k/s) and I had no speed-problem at all - even during the 12 hours it needed to compile a new kernel. At that time I used Redhat with a 2.2.x kernel - but I'm sure the newest 486-capable-SuSE distribution (7.3 ???) without X should make it, too I never used Squid on that box - so maybe that's the point. Cheers, Oliver Kellermann