My first firewall, was a 486 DX2-66 & 24 MB, running Slackware 7. It worked fine. Hans du Plooy wrote:
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