-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: Manuel Kasper <mk at neon1 dot net> 

> On 01.01.06 21:20 +0000, listsubs0506 at comcast dot net wrote: 
> 
> > Manuel), but I'll be keeping a close watch in the coming days. I 
> > did get the messages below in the System logs. But I'm guessing 
> > those don't represent a problem as everything has been working fine 
> > so far. - Steve Ronan 
> > 
> > /kernel: pid 363 (php), uid 0, was killed: out of swap space 
> 
> This means that your m0n0wall box is running out of memory. How many 
> MBs do you have in there? What does the memory usage bar on the main 
> webGUI page display? 
> 
> - Manuel 

I'm using a Soekris net4501-30 bought about six months ago. They 
say those currently have 64 Mbytes of RAM
http://www.soekris.com/how_to_buy.htm
and that's apparently what mine has. According to dmesg:
real memory  = 67108864 (65536K bytes)
avail memory = 50819072 (49628K bytes)
and in regard to the flash card:
ad0: 122MB <SanDisk SDCFB-128> [980/8/32] at ata0-master BIOSPIO
I'll send you the full dmesg separately.
I've been showing 51-59%  memory usage. It's an 8MB/768 line, operating at well under capacity.
Perhaps unrelatedly, the most troublesome symptom I'm seeing now is some messages like this:
(null) 408 Request Timeout Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:23:27 GMT 
Cache-Control: no-cache,no-store Content-Type: text/html; 
charset=%s Cache-Control: max-age=0 Expires: Mon, 02 Jan 2006 
00:23:27 GMT Connection: close
408 Request Timeout
No request appeared within a reasonable time period.
I've encountered that while trying to log in via the captive portal after a timeout and while
checking logs/settings at the m0n0wall box address:
http://192.168.100.1:8000/

That may have nothing much to do with m0n0wall. I'm at the farther 
reaches of a community wireless network averaging about 200 ms 
pinging Google with something approaching 15% packet loss.
But if there's a timeout setting that could be changed for the portal, perhaps it would be helpful
in situations like this with a less than robust wireless connection. Though I realize there'd also
most likely be some downside to doing that.

I've been wondering, given the memory I have available, whether it would still make sense to
increase the default connections from the 4/16 where I have left it. Does it seem like that's
probably inadvisable? There do seem to be quite a few people (20-30 at a time?) (or at least their
computers which may be unattended) that get addresses through DHCP but don't log in through the
portal.
   - Steve