RE: Firewall performance

[Patrick Ethier <patrick@secureops.com>]

Hi Steve,

 I had the exact same problem. I had installed a SOCKS server with OpenBSD
2.6 . I ran into all sorts of problems. The ISA cards I had were NE2000. It
was taking about 1 hour to load a simple website. My suggestion is, either
go get some old D-Link ISA cards or something out of a computer graveyard or
do like I did which was updrade o a PCI bused 486dx100 and slap in some
cheap PCI Ethernet cards.

BTW, I now get throughput of 200K on transfers with FTP. I'm using a
486Dx100 with 32MB ram and 1 gig HD.  + 2 x Realtek 100Mb cards on a cable
modem.


Hope this gives you some encouragement,

Patrick Ethier
patrick@secureops.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Roggenkamp [mailto:roggenkamps@acm.org]
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 1:31 AM
To: tech@openbsd.org
Subject: Firewall performance


I installed OpenBSD on a 486 machine over the weekend and made an
attempt to create a firewall, but I encountered severe performance
difficulties.  It took hours to download a small amount of email.  I had
expected great performance, but I reinstalled Linux due to the poor
performance and lack of time to diagnose the problem without email
support.  If anyone could offer suggestions as to how to set up a
firewall with obsd I would appreciate it.  The specifics of my
installation:

	Gateway 486DX2/66 28Mb RAM
	Linksys Ethernet NE2000 cards with default IRQ & IO addresses
		one going to a cable modem
		the other going to a 10Mb/sec 10BaseT network
	Generic 2.6 kernel from the distribution

I used the /usr/share/ipf/firewall.2 and /usr/share/ipf/nat.1 files with
minimal changes, mainly changing the addresses.

I had acceptable ftp performance from outside machines to the firewall,
but not across the firewall.  I was able to get data across the
firewall, but not very fast.  I figure it was something in my
configuration, but I could not diagnose where the problem occurred.

TIA,
Steve

-- 
-----
Steve Roggenkamp
InterNet:    roggenkamps@acm.org
WWW:         http://home.columbus.rr.com/roggenkamps/