Router minimum spec/bottlenecking
Hi all, I have just moved into my new house, and the promised land of cable modem access is only 8 days away :-). I already have an ISDN connection which I will use for a backup when the cable modem is down, and I am looking to put together a router running Suse (probably 7.0 for the moment). The router will be doing IP Masqueurading, and firewalling, for a network of about 4 or 5 users maximum. The machine will also be doing a bit of web, ftp, and mail serving ( only for personal convenience), and possibly making a VPN connection to a friend's network. I won't bother loading any GUI stuff onto it. What I would like to know is... can anyone suggest a minimum spec for this? I have quite a few old machines, ranging from a 486-66, up to a pentium 233. I'd like to use as low a spec as possible, as the higher machines are better for playing with X-Windows. Also, once I set the machine up, is there an easy way to know if the router is bottlenecking the network ? I know how to test in Windows NT with performance manager, but will "top" do the same job (can i tell whether the network card throughput is being throttled just by looking at the CPU/memory usage)? Thanks as always! Iain
On July 2, 2001 02:56 pm, Iain Gray wrote:
Hi all,
I have just moved into my new house, and the promised land of cable modem access is only 8 days away :-). I already have an ISDN connection which I will use for a backup when the cable modem is down, and I am looking to put together a router running Suse (probably 7.0 for the moment). The router will be doing IP Masqueurading, and firewalling, for a network of about 4 or 5 users maximum.
The machine will also be doing a bit of web, ftp, and mail serving ( only for personal convenience), and possibly making a VPN connection to a friend's network. I won't bother loading any GUI stuff onto it.
What I would like to know is... can anyone suggest a minimum spec for this? I have quite a few old machines, ranging from a 486-66, up to a pentium 233. I'd like to use as low a spec as possible, as the higher machines are
I used to use a pentium/90 with 32 meg of ram for a 1meg DSL connection. At full speed the machine barely stayed awake. It wouldn't surprise me if the 486s could handle the job. Set the machine up and do a download from a fast FTP site. Check your speed I doubt you will have any trouble sticking at the top speed the ftp site can feed you. The only thing I've heard of is to avoid ISA network cards if you can. Nick
thanks, I'll give it a try with my 486-66. Have you any idea why ISA cards can be a problem? Is the slower bus communication likely to prove a bottleneck even at 512K ? Iain
-----Original Message----- From: Nick Zentena [mailto:zentena@hophead.dyndns.org] Sent: 02 July 2001 12:30 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] Router minimum spec/bottlenecking
On July 2, 2001 02:56 pm, Iain Gray wrote:
Hi all,
I have just moved into my new house, and the promised land of cable modem access is only 8 days away :-). I already have an ISDN connection which I will use for a backup when the cable modem is down, and I am looking to put together a router running Suse (probably 7.0 for the moment). The router will be doing IP Masqueurading, and firewalling, for a network of about 4 or 5 users maximum.
The machine will also be doing a bit of web, ftp, and mail serving ( only for personal convenience), and possibly making a VPN connection to a friend's network. I won't bother loading any GUI stuff onto it.
What I would like to know is... can anyone suggest a minimum spec for this? I have quite a few old machines, ranging from a 486-66, up to a pentium 233. I'd like to use as low a spec as possible, as the higher machines are
I used to use a pentium/90 with 32 meg of ram for a 1meg DSL connection. At full speed the machine barely stayed awake. It wouldn't surprise me if the 486s could handle the job. Set the machine up and do a download from a fast FTP site. Check your speed I doubt you will have any trouble sticking at the top speed the ftp site can feed you. The only thing I've heard of is to avoid ISA network cards if you can.
Nick
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On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 05:57:28PM +0100, iain.gray@nexusdata.co.uk wrote:
thanks, I'll give it a try with my 486-66. Have you any idea why ISA cards can be a problem? Is the slower bus communication likely to prove a bottleneck even at 512K ?
Theoretical max. ISA bus speed way higher than 512 kb/s - the bus runs at at least 8.77 MHz, and has a 16-bit bus. I know that it takes a few bus cycles per bus transaction, but even so, actual bus speed is not the problem. I'm guessing it is due to the fact that ISA cards are generally not as good at DMA as PCI ones. Whichever one you go for, I suggest that you go for a reasonable network card - avoid NE2000s, as they put lots of load on the CPU. For ISA, I suggest a 3c509, or for PCI, a 3c9xx. The better the card, the more load it will take from the CPU. BTW, have you considered smoothwall? -- David Smith Tel: +44 (0)1454 462380 (direct) STMicroelectronics Fax: +44 (0)1454 617910 1000 Aztec West TINA (ST only): (065) 2380 Almondsbury Home: 01454 616963 BRISTOL Mobile: 07932 642724 BS32 4SQ Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk
That makes sense... the ISA NICs I have lying around are 3Com Etherlinks anyway. What is smoothwall? I've not heard of it before! Iain
-----Original Message----- From: Dave Smith [mailto:Dave.Smith@st.com] Sent: 03 July 2001 09:10 To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Subject: Re: [SLE] Router minimum spec/bottlenecking
On Mon, Jul 02, 2001 at 05:57:28PM +0100, iain.gray@nexusdata.co.uk wrote:
thanks, I'll give it a try with my 486-66. Have you any idea why ISA cards can be a problem? Is the slower bus communication likely to prove a bottleneck even at 512K ?
Theoretical max. ISA bus speed way higher than 512 kb/s - the bus runs at at least 8.77 MHz, and has a 16-bit bus. I know that it takes a few bus cycles per bus transaction, but even so, actual bus speed is not the problem.
I'm guessing it is due to the fact that ISA cards are generally not as good at DMA as PCI ones.
Whichever one you go for, I suggest that you go for a reasonable network card - avoid NE2000s, as they put lots of load on the CPU. For ISA, I suggest a 3c509, or for PCI, a 3c9xx. The better the card, the more load it will take from the CPU.
BTW, have you considered smoothwall?
-- David Smith Tel: +44 (0)1454 462380 (direct) STMicroelectronics Fax: +44 (0)1454 617910 1000 Aztec West TINA (ST only): (065) 2380 Almondsbury Home: 01454 616963 BRISTOL Mobile: 07932 642724 BS32 4SQ Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk
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On Tue, Jul 03, 2001 at 03:54:52PM +0100, iain.gray@nexusdata.co.uk wrote:
That makes sense... the ISA NICs I have lying around are 3Com Etherlinks anyway. What is smoothwall? I've not heard of it before!
A minimum spec Linux distro (about 80Mb), that provides a firewall, router, DMZ, DNS cache, HTTP cache, DHCP, port forwarding, masqerading, and a few other services. Administered with a web interface, but also provides SSH access. Doesn't do mail, but then, do you really want to run sendmail on your firewall, given its history of security holes? :-) http://www.smoothwall.org -- David Smith Tel: +44 (0)1454 462380 (direct) STMicroelectronics Fax: +44 (0)1454 617910 1000 Aztec West TINA (ST only): (065) 2380 Almondsbury Home: 01454 616963 BRISTOL Mobile: 07932 642724 BS32 4SQ Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk
* Iain Gray; <iain.gray@nexusdata.co.uk> on 02 Jul, 2001 wrote:
Hi all,
What I would like to know is... can anyone suggest a minimum spec for this? I have quite a few old machines, ranging from a 486-66, up to a pentium 233. I'd like to use as low a spec as possible, as the higher machines are better for playing with X-Windows. Also, once I set the machine up, is there an
I have 486/75 with 24 MB memory with 210 MB disk running SuSE 7.1 kernel 2.2.19 selected suse configuration DMZ and deleted all the documantation plus man pages HTH -- Togan Muftuoglu
participants (4)
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Dave Smith -
Iain Gray -
Nick Zentena -
Togan Muftuoglu