From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Oct 2 11:15:33 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6988837B401 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:15:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from priv-edtnes44.telusplanet.net (defout.telus.net [199.185.220.240]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A264343E3B for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:15:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from james@icionline.ca) Received: from box2 ([142.179.169.187]) by priv-edtnes44.telusplanet.net (InterMail vM.5.01.05.12 201-253-122-126-112-20020820) with SMTP id <20021002181526.DMSS3208.priv-edtnes44.telusplanet.net@box2> for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:15:26 -0600 Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:25:55 -0600 From: James Earl To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: advise on gateway-setup Message-Id: <20021002122555.3b9bc77c.james@icionline.ca> In-Reply-To: <3D9B3507.6000306@aylix.com> References: <20021002160429.GC96783@deter.dk> <3D9B3507.6000306@aylix.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.8.3 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i386-portbld-freebsd4.6) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 02 Oct 2002 14:03:51 -0400 "Michael H. Semcheski" wrote: > > > > > >Ok. After this little self promo its time for my questions. > >The building I live in has 200+ apartments which in near future will > >share an (I hope) powerful internet connection. Now I was put in-charge > >of selecting the equipment to preform firewalling and gateway. > >What I like it to do is firewalling and some sort of natted intranet > >with bandwidth management. My question is. How powerful should the > >gateway/firewall be? I am thinking about CPU and RAM and hardware en > >general. Also I would be glad to get pointers on where to read for > >setting up this..ofcause I will start whit the handbook right about here > > > > > > Get a Pentium III with 512m of RAM and Intel ethernet cards. Get SCSI > disks. You might look at a dell poweredge server. It probably does not > have to be the top of the line, but if you are going to get a real > highbandwidth connection to the net, you're probably going to be paying > a lot more per month in bandwidth than you will on hardware. The last > thing you want is a disk to go down. > > Realize that you are about to undertake a serious project, and don't > skimp on the initial hardware. Its a drop in the bucket in the long > term (even if it doesn't seem that way now.) Rackmount is good, because > physical space can be pretty expensive. > > Don't get the cheapest thing you can find, because you really want to > put off upgrading it as long as possible. (even if the upgrade is to > replace a burned out fan) > > Mike I'm in a similar position, but on a smaller scale. I'm trying to figure out where these Switched Gateway/Routers/Firewall/VPN devices that are coming on the market fit in, and where it is better to use our favorite FreeBSD machine to do the work? Would I be wrong in assuming these little hardware devices are faster at the job than a FreeBSD machine? James To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message