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On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 06:57:43 -0500, Greg Brown <gregbrown at mindspring dot com> wrote: > Last night I presented m0n0 to my local LUG. I feel the presentation > came off fairly well and we managed to get some good audience > participation where they posted a few good questions I'd like to run > across the board. > Cool! > 1. If one were to use the generic PC image how many ethernet ports can > m0n0 address? This particular client has a need for a 32 port > firewall. Can m0n0 handle this given enough processor power and RAM? > The thought was the BSD subsystem should be able to handle it well > enough but what about m0n0 itself? Is there a mathematical formula to > determine the processor and RAM requirements for a system such as this? > I'm not aware of any limits on interfaces. The problem would probably be fitting 32 ports into the case! :) Most systems only have 6 PCI slots, so even with 4 port NIC's you only get 24 ports. Another problem is PCI bus throughput, if those 32 ports each need to push a decent amount of data, you're going to overwhelm it quickly. Even on a server class motherboard with multiple PCI buses you could overload it without much trouble with that many ports. Lastly, I must question the network design of anybody that needs 32 ports on a firewall. m0n0wall has VLAN support, which would almost certainly be more suitable. > 2. Has anyone ported m0n0 to SPARC or powerPC? Is this something that > is being investigated for future releases? > The SPARC and PPC FreeBSD ports are nowhere near production ready. See http://people.freebsd.org/~obrien/freebsd-sparc/status.html http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/ppc.html If you have time on your hands and know BSD, a port to NetBSD would allow these platforms and many others. > 3. Under the m0n0 license could the product be rebranded for resale? > The thought here was as a consultant could you, in a managed firewall > setup for a customer, paint the Soekris case (for instance) can it a > Company X SuperWALL, or whatever, and be in compliance with the > license? > Chet is 100% correct, I'll leave that with his explanation. -Chris |