From owner-freebsd-questions Thu May 16 19:59:13 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id TAA02439 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 16 May 1996 19:59:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.barrnet.net (mail.barrnet.net [131.119.246.7]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA02432 for ; Thu, 16 May 1996 19:59:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from relay-2.mail.demon.net (disperse.demon.co.uk [158.152.1.77]) by mail.barrnet.net (8.7.5/MAIL-RELAY-LEN) with SMTP id TAA08464 for ; Thu, 16 May 1996 19:58:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: from post.demon.co.uk ([158.152.1.72]) by relay-2.mail.demon.net id ab05421; 17 May 96 1:41 +0100 Received: from jraynard.demon.co.uk ([158.152.42.77]) by relay-3.mail.demon.net id aa28102; 17 May 96 1:40 +0100 Received: (from fqueries@localhost) by jraynard.demon.co.uk (8.7.5/8.6.12) id WAA18940; Thu, 16 May 1996 22:19:35 GMT Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 22:19:35 GMT From: James Raynard Message-Id: <199605162219.WAA18940@jraynard.demon.co.uk> To: lmcsato@lmc.ericsson.se CC: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-reply-to: (message from Samy Touati on Wed, 15 May 1996 13:47:23 -0400 (EDT)) Subject: Re: memory requirements for a fbsd gateway Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 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