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To: Wayne Pascoe <freebsd-questions@penguinpowered.org>
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Subject: Re: Hardware requirements for firewall
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On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Wayne Pascoe wrote:

> > Why not just try it?
>
> Because it's a commercial hosting operation pushing up to 20Mb/s with
> SLA's to our clients.
>
> My biggest fear is not that this won't work, but that it will work but
> with intermittant bugs.

Introducing a new machine has a certain level of risk. What is your
contingency plan if the machine fails anyway?

If there is so much at stake why not use the better machine then?
Another alternative.. prepare both machines. Have the better machine ready
to do an able to be connected/switched to at a moments notice. Put the
slower machine on at the slowest day. Monitor it closely as traffic grows.