[ale] Firewall discussion...hardware horsepower?

[Christopher Fowler]

Currently I'm evaluating a transmetta product.

4 serial ports, 1 10/100, sound, video, 64 DOM, 256m, 800mhz, and
1 PCI slot.  Small little box but I believe it costs around $500 in
lots of 1.

On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 05:55:06PM -0400, Chris Woodfield wrote:
> Basically, the problem was that if I was logging bad packets, the CPU 
> would get overloaded when a particularly large number of logged packets 
> came in, such as a particularly virulent portscan. It's very possible 
> that it could have been the hard drive (it's an old one, 2.5GB Maxtor, 
> ATA33, no DMA), but I don't have another drive available at the moment 
> to swap in.
> 
> At any rate, I recently acquired a rackmount cabinet, and I'd like to 
> get something I can mount in it as opposed to just sitting a Mini-ITX 
> case on a shelf; there are Mini-ITX rackmount cases, but they're 
> expensive, and for the price I could buy a small standard ATX rackmount 
> box and a low-end mobo/cpu combo.
> 
> Which brings me to my next question...if I'm looking for low cost and 
> high power/heat efficiency, which CPU that goes with a standard ATX 
> motherboard would one recommend?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -C
> 
> On Jul 5, 2004, at 3:19 AM, Dow Hurst wrote:
> 
> >Chris Woodfield wrote:
> >
> >>As an adjunct to the firewall discussion, I'm looking at upgrading 
> >>mine...I'm currently running a Via EDEN 500 based box which does 
> >>strict packet filtering and connection tracking fine, but starts to 
> >>have issues when I turn on any sort of packet logging and/or IDS. I 
> >>also would like something I can rackmount in a 1U case.
> >>
> >>Obviously I don't need a 3 GHz Pentium 4 and a gig a RAM for this; 
> >>would would be the minimum suggested system to use here? I'm 
> >>basically looking to run iptables in a one-to-one NAT config for some 
> >>hosts and one-to-many NAT for others, and do blocked packet logging, 
> >>snort, and some small servers (DHCP, SNMP for generating MRTG graphs, 
> >>and possibly a SOCKS proxypot as well).
> >>
> >>Also, suggestions for cheap 1U rackmount cases are welcome as well 
> >>(I'm leaning towards SuperMicro's SC512)...
> >>
> >> Thanks for the input,
> >>
> >>-Chris
> >>
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> >>
> >Have you checked with hdparm your disk throughput?  I am curious too 
> >as to why you are having performance issues.  Is it disk or is it CPU 
> >related?
> >Dow
> >
> >
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> 
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