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Date:      Wed, 28 Jun 2000 11:08:03 -0400
From:      Nathan Vidican <webmaster@wmptl.com>
To:        Evan Tsoukalas <evan@sourcee.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: NATd load question
Message-ID:  <395A14D3.384BBAD3@wmptl.com>
References:  <20000623120131.B14899@sourcee.com>

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Evan Tsoukalas wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I've been running natd on a -CURRENT FreeBSD box for several
> months now to share my cable modem between the four computers on
> my home network.  It's been a rather painless experience, and even
> during fairly heavy server loads (make buildworld's), there isn't
> any real noticeable degradation in performance.
> 
> I now need to look into a large scale natd implementation for
> work (250+ computers), so I went to the archives to see if
> someone had posted about a natd implementation of that size.
> After browsing through a lot of posts, I noticed that the question
> has come up several times, but I couldn't, for the life of me, find
> an answer.
> 
> So, has anyone used natd for a 200+ computer network?  If so,
> what did your hardware config look like?  Any tips?
> 
> Also, during my search, I saw a post in early April stating that
> the standard ipfw config for natd
> 
>         ipfw -q flush
>     ipfw add 100 divert natd ip from any to any via $natd_interface
>     ipfw add 200 allow ip from any to any
> 
> places a lot of load on the server by sending local packets that
> don't need translation to the daemon anyway.  Does anyone have
> any suggestions on how to do this better?
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 
> --
> Regards,
> 
> Evan Tsoukalas
> Systems Administrator
> Source Electronics Corporation
> evan@sourcee.com
> 
> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message

We recently setup the internet access for a large convention here in
Windsor Ontario. We ran two NATD boxes, each with a Class B network. The
hardware is as follows:

	4U Rackmount Chassis, 300W P/S
	ATX Microstar Super Socket 7 Board,
	AMD K6-2 500mhz
	128megs PC100
	4meg Generic AGP video
	Realtek 10/100 PCI NIC (rl0)
	Ne2000 PCI Clone, (ed1)

One box ran to an internal LAN, (192.168.x.x/255.255.0.0), the other two
a wireless ethernet on 10.0.x.x/255.255.0.0). Both boxes tied into the
private networks with the 100BaseTX cards running full-duplex to
switches (directly to an access point router in the case of the wireless
box). The ed1 interface was tied to a small hub connected to a Cisco
router running a partial T3 to the internet.
The machines costed less than $1000 (Canadian funds ~700US at the time),
and ran flawlessly. They all ran with a load average of less than 5% for
the most part, and didn't fail once for the entire event.
Price/performance, I'd reccomend you go with an AMD K6 CPU (500mhz =
$80CDN ~50US). This would be my ideal reccomendations for the hardware.
	The machine I'm sitting on writting this email is connected to the
internet through a natd box here, as are approx 60 other machines. This
natd boxes configurations is as follows:

	FreeBSD 3.4
	486SX 25mhz
	16megs RAM
	212meg IDE Disk
	(2) SMC ISA NE1000 compatable NIC's (ed0/ed1)
	Uptime: 
	10:52AM  up 126 days,  2:49, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.01, 0.03

The box has run perfectly ever since it's initial installation; I havn't
touched it short of installing a UPS sometime ago. (Power isn't all that
great around here, and I didn't want to have to worry about it rebooting
all the time).
	In both cases, once the machines were up and running, I disabled all
services, (no inetd, no sendmail, no ftp, etc), removed the monitor and
keyboard and left them be. The little 486 here runs perfectly just
sitting there in the server room on a shelf; if it goes down then it
takes like <2mins to reboot and resume functioning.
	One thing I do reccomend, is that if you're going to dedicate a machine
to NATD, that you use the smallest hardrive you can afford to trust. The
reason being that when/if it does reboot without being dismounted
properly, (eg power failure), it doesn't take long to get through fsck
at startup.
	That's pretty much my extent of knowledge when it comes to NATD, hope
it helps.

	
-- 
Nathan Vidican
webmaster@wmptl.com
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmptl.com/


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