On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 1:29 AM, JP Vossen<jp at jpsdomain dot org> wrote:
> I recently moved my wireless access point to a dedicated interface on my
> M0n0wall generic-pc 1.231 running on an 10 year old OptiPlex Gs+ P166. (Wow,
> I'd forgotten how *old* that box was!  M0n0wall works great, though the GUI
> is a tad sluggish.)
>
> When the WRT54GL wireless AP was directly on the LAN, standard def MPEG2
> played over MythTV perfectly.  Now that I've firewalled it (separate
> segment, non-bridged) and opened up TCP/3306 and TCP/6543-6544 (tried with
> and w/o 'frag'), playback is too choppy to watch.  It will play for ~2
> seconds, pause for ~2 seconds, etc.
>
> I'm only using 21% of memory and CPU load is in the 0-5% range even when
> attempting to watch MythTV.  No VPNs, pretty small environment.  FYI the LAN
> and W_LAN ports are on the same IntelDual (fxp driver) card (though I know
> the packets still have to leave the card to go through packet filtering).
>  The LAN itself is a D-Link DLI-DGS-1224T "smart" 10/100/1000 switch, and as
> noted when everything was local to that it worked fine (since the limit
> there was wireless speed).
>
> While I admit the FW hardware is ancient (P166!), according to M0n0wall I'm
> still barely using it.  Does anyone think throwing hardware at the firewall
> will fix this problem?

What you'll usually see when your hardware is maxed out is your CPU
will be maxed out, so it doesn't seem like you're hitting its limit.
Bus speed could be an issue too, but I wouldn't think so at such low
traffic rates, your wireless will max out at ~25 Mbps and I suspect
streaming probably doesn't take half that much, which isn't really all
*that* much traffic, you could push that with a 133 MHz 486 Soekris
45xx board. Check Status -> Interfaces, any errors there?


> Would the latest M0n0wall beta firmware help?
>

That would lower the maximum throughput of your hardware, though it
doesn't seem like you're hitting it, so it may be worth trying. Might
be some kind of quirk in one of the drivers specific to your
combination of hardware. It should be easy enough to downgrade if the
situation gets worse.