On Sunday 17 February 2002 07:34, Clayton Cornell wrote:
On Sunday 17 February 2002 07:50, Alex Daniloff wrote:
Hello SuSE folkz, I've got an old 486 DX 75MHz PC with PCI and ISA slots. I'd like to to utilize this dinosaur as a firewall box using two 100MB/sec PCI NICs.
There are a number of factors... how are you planning on using the 486 as a firewall? Are you going to invent your own configuration and install? Or, have you found some firewall software package you plan to use?
Smoothwall, for example, is a nice firewall package that will turn an old PC like you have into a router/firewall. If you use this package on a 486 with 100mb NICs on a small home network - 2 or 3 machines - you will not notice any speed issues.
The general bottlenecks you will have, using the Smoothwall example, are: Processor - trying to filter more packets than the processor can handle. You can use a 386, but 486 or higher is better. Drive space - too small HD (under 100 MB), and using your firewall machine as a web proxy means lots of drive access delays. RAM - not enough RAM... less than 8MB is a problem Internet connection - slow dialup connection is always limited. Use the fastest that is available/affordable. Front bus speed - never looked at this as a possible speed limiing factor.
Basically performance depends on how you are planning on using the old machine (configuration, firewall application etc.), and what kind of network it's going to serve.