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cotfessi
09-24-2002, 02:43 PM
I wanted to ask some questions regarding home networking... my wife and
I both have dual boot linux/windows boxes right now and I have a third
box that runs linux exclusively. I've been thinking about turning that
linux only box into a firewall/gateway/etc.

I've posted a few questions on this board, and I've been poking around
the interent looking for howtos and tutorials but I still have some
unanswered questions that I was hoping the good folks at LNO might be
able to answer:


1. What sort of perfomance hit are we talking about when it comes to an
internet connection? Will my speeds be slowed at all by the fact that
I'm going to be putting another box between myself and the internet?

2. Currently each of my three machines has it's own static ip address
and handles it's own firewall. say that all of my out going addresses
start with 208.xxx.xxx.xxx, Can I leave everything the way that it is
and put a second NIC in my linux-only box and give it an internal
address like 192.168.xxx.xxx? That way, all of my boxes have an ip
address to the world, and my linux only box has a second door that is
accesible only to the oher boxes on my network? In this scenario, I
would not run my other boxes through the linux-only box as a
router/firewall. I would only want to run samba and a proxy through the
second nic. Is that possible or am I way off base?

drDigital
09-24-2002, 03:00 PM
answer to # 1: as long as the 3rd computer (the gateway) has enough RAM and MHz and your inet connection is fast enough, there should not be much of a problem.

drDigital
09-24-2002, 03:03 PM
like probably 512 MB SDRAM

michaelk
09-24-2002, 03:11 PM
I can't quantify a number other to say yes. However, I don't think it will be noticeable to the naked eye. You don't say what kind of broadband you are using but DSL or cable is only 10M anyway. BTW I have two standalone networks with a Pentium 133 running RH 7.2 as a firewall in between and don't see a significant difference.

cotfessi
09-24-2002, 03:13 PM
my possible firewall/router box is a pII 300 with 512mb SDRAM

The Whizzard
09-24-2002, 03:13 PM
Originally posted by drDigital
like probably 512 MB SDRAM
This can easily be done on a 66Mhz 486 with 32MB RAM without any noticable slow down.