Looking for older computer

[AlphaDrake]

At SmarchLAN we borrowed a server running OpenBSD to act as the router, and I think it worked pretty awesome (never noticed slow internet, even the guys playing ETQW had the same pings they had at home).

But I gotta give the server back. Anyone have a somewhat older computer I can buy off them to replace it permanently?

[Latency]

I got a few here from old clients. I can get one up and running in 10 min. Think the best one's a P4 2.2 with 1GB mem ... might be 512 tho. Contact me if u r interested.

[Grapeman]

YES.............OPENBSD FTW!!! FU LINUX, FU FREEBSD............

[Spyhop]

Like there's a big difference

[fittysix]

FREEBSD FOREVER!!!!!

ipfw pwns ur pf!

[zeroumus]

I am sort of investigating this solution myself. It might be an alternative to the hardware solution i have been trying to temp myself with.

The problem i am having with this is 2 things 1) Not knowing anything "linux/unix,bsd"ish makes the larning curve a little steep. 2) All these software solutions dont give any clue as to how they perform compared to anything. Does your average computer have what it takes to compete with a dedicated hardware solution running custom processors with almost no bus overhead?




edit:

for example, PF sense makes the following warning

In environments requiring more than 3 Gbps or 1 million packets per second of sustained throughput, no router based on commodity hardware offers adequate performance. Such environments need to deploy layer 3 switches (routing done in hardware by the switch) or high end ASIC-based routers. As commodity hardware increases in performance, and general purpose operating systems like FreeBSD improve packet processing capabilities in line with what new hardware capabilities can support, scalability will continue to improve with time.

[fittysix]

All these software solutions dont give any clue as to how they perform compared to anything. Does your average computer have what it takes to compete with a dedicated hardware solution running custom processors with almost no bus overhead?

Well, as for FreeBSD anyways, a P4 3.0 with 2gb of RAM can serve about 1200+ clients with between 1.5-6mbit each

That being said it's hard to say how it does with HIGH bandwidth per client, if you want lots of bandwidth per client I would at least suggest PCI-e network cards, since the physical bus can actually support more than 1 gigabit.
In my experience with it the kernel is more than capable of actually routing the traffic at high speeds however.


edit: btw for anyone running a commodity hardware router, if you want lots of clients, use lots of ram, the routing tables are all kept in ram

[r337ard]

We're well outside of the type of scenario described there, we're not looking to switch high bandwidth traffic or route it between networks - we're just looking for a gateway here. We're not going to be pushing those kinds of traffic numbers through the network head for a long long time - so long as all the switches are trunked together and don't rely on our head end router to pass traffic between them we're fine.

[slayer]

There is another option for firewall/router.

A product called untangle. Pretty powerful and fairly simple to use and configure.

http://www.untangle.com/

[LiViD]

Looks like it's a bit of a pig. P4/80GB's/1GB of RAM to start? I'd trade some complexity in setting up a BSD router than use that solution.

[zeroumus]

Well, if its simple and it does not jack peopls pings, I got no problem with it being a pig