On 3/15/06, Fred Weston <fweston at gmail dot com> wrote:
>
> I used to use m0n0 quite extensively a few years ago but haven't used
> it recently.  I was wondering what the minimum recommended system
> would be to ensure that adding m0n0 in between my LAN and the Internet
> will not adversely affect throughput or latency.

Depends on how much bandwidth.


> A friend of mine is
> running m0n0 at home with 5mbit cable and notices that his speed
> diminishes an average of 1-1.5mbit when using m0n0 vs directly
> connecting to the cable modem.  He is running a PII 266MHz with 64MB
> RAM.

Either that's not true, or there's a serious hardware issue there.  A
PII 266 is way more than enough hardware to fill a 5 Mb pipe, add as
little latency as any firewall, and be running at under 25%
utilization.

I run a Soekris 4501, 486 133 MHz, 64 MB RAM, on my 6 Mb cable modem,
and with it floored with the ugliest load you could possibly throw at
a firewall (like a bunch of BitTorrent is always a good test, the pps
drags things to a crawl for some firewalls), my firewall runs at under
50% utilization.

By "utilization" above, I mean CPU, since CPU is almost always going
to be your first bottleneck on a firewall with a sub-500 MHz proc and
100 Mb NIC's.

-Chris