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Date:      Thu, 16 May 1996 22:19:35 GMT
From:      James Raynard <fqueries@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
To:        lmcsato@lmc.ericsson.se
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: memory requirements for a fbsd gateway
Message-ID:  <199605162219.WAA18940@jraynard.demon.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.Sola.3.91.960515134658.1690B-100000@chicago> (message from Samy Touati on Wed, 15 May 1996 13:47:23 -0400 (EDT))

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> I have a 386 machine  with 8meg of ram that acts as a gateway beween a 
> pool of networked sparcs and a ppp connection at home.
> Is there any special settings to the kernel that I can make so to 
> optimize the forwarding of packets from the ethernet card to the ppp 
> interface?

I'm slightly confused by the word 'optimise'. Do you mean that nothing
at all is happening? In which case 'sysctl -w ip.forwarding=1' (as
root, at the command line) should get things moving. You can automate
this by editing a line in /etc/sysconfig to say

# If you want this host to be a gateway, set to YES.
gateway=YES

and re-booting.

If you mean it works, but it's slow, I would have thought the hardware
was more likely to be the problem. Can you tell us what kind of
ethernet card and serial port you have?

> Is upgrading to a 486SX a good move? 

Possibly, but I would expect a 386 to be able to cope with this under
a reasonable load. Is this machine being used for anything else?

> Is adding more memory (from 8 to 16Meg) a good idea?

8MB should be plenty if you're not running X. (Assuming you've got a
reasonable amount of swap - say 16M).

-- 
James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland
jraynard@dial.pipex.com
james@jraynard.demon.co.uk



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