[SOLVED] System necessary for a firewall/router?

crosstalk · 02-25-2011, 02:04 PM

I was hoping to build an OpenBSD-based firewall or router (I know it's not Linux, but the performance difference should be negligible).

I have an old 450 MHz Pentium II machine with 128MiB of RAM, and am wondering if it is up to the task of running a firewall. I plan on using one 10/100-Mbps PCI adapter to connect to our modem, and another (possibly gigabit) one to connect to our internal network.

On this box, I would like to run intrusion prevention software, a DNS server, a DHCP server, and QoS.

Would this computer suffice for this role?

fordeck · 02-25-2011, 02:17 PM

I have seen a Soekris 4801 using MonoWall do exactly what you are talking about here.

There is probably no need for the gigabit NIC if it is only going to be routing traffic between itself and your WAN connection.

Edit: MonoWall uses BSD and the Soekris 4801 only has a 233 to 266 Mhz NSC SC1100 single chip processor

Regards,

Fordeck

crosstalk · 02-25-2011, 02:33 PM

Okay, that's good to hear.

Actually, at this point, I'm thinking of having 3 NICs:

2 100Mbps ones -- one to connect to our modem, one to connect to our existing router.
1 1000Mbps one -- to connect to another, higher-speed network.

I currently have a server, but it's a laptop with only a 100Mbps NIC. If this has processing power to spare (to be determined after I set it up), I might move my bittorrent software (and associated Apache server to make the files accessible over the network) over to this, for the gigabit download speeds. If not, I'll get a gigabit NIC for my current server.

I am aware that the PCI bus's total thoroughput is only slightly more than a gigabit -- I don't absolutely need the extra performance, but downloading a 5 GiB torrent from my bittorrent setup over 100Mbps isn't as fast as I want.

Thank you for the help.