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Date:      Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:55:29 +0200
From:      Andreas Nilsson <andrnils@gmail.com>
To:        Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>, Chris Nehren <cnehren+freebsd-stable@pobox.com>, Peter Jeremy <peter@rulingia.com>
Subject:   Re: Suggestions for low-power gigE firewall?
Message-ID:  <CAPS9%2BSspb6%2BA4v5=agzff=vHHNDtgQJ6GbRLmw6vOG1NUf6HCQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAFHbX1K0D%2B0KCeZdU1wm5DiFv4E_FsuR6QwFAsLUrdg4RdiUcg@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20140613121732.GA61092@behemoth> <20140615090845.GB42502@server.rulingia.com> <CAFHbX1K0D%2B0KCeZdU1wm5DiFv4E_FsuR6QwFAsLUrdg4RdiUcg@mail.gmail.com>

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On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 10:08 AM, Peter Jeremy <peter@rulingia.com> wrote:
> > On 2014-Jun-13 08:17:33 -0400, Chris Nehren <
> cnehren+freebsd-stable@pobox.com> wrote:
> >>Speaking of Soekris elsethread, I'm presently interested in
> >>picking up a small device to use as a router + firewall for my
> >>home network.
> >
> > One thing to keep in mind is that 'gigE firewall' is fairly meaningless
> by
> > itself.  Most of the load is per-packet and GigE could be anywhere
> between
> > (roughly) 80kpps and 1.5mpps.
> >
> > That said, since you mention 'home network', I presume you don't need
> complex
> > packet manipulation at wire-speed.  Note that whilst the re(4) driver
> doesn't
> > have the same comments as the rl(4) driver, you will still need
> significantly
> > more CPU power to get the same thruput from a RTL8111 as (eg) an em.
>
> This is quite interesting to me; I'm very fortunate in that my ISP
> provides synchronous gigabit, which comes in to my block of flats as
> fibre and then is presented to me as ethernet.
>
> The ISP provided a router; they also noted that the router was not
> capable of utilizing the whole connection, and the most that I could
> achieve out of it would be ~ 800-900Mbit. Plus, although it's a pretty
> good router, I want to run my own dhcpd settings, configure tunnels
> and VPNs etc.
>
> Ideally, I'd replace it with my home server, but there is not enough
> space in the "comms room" (aka the washing machine closet) to put that
> there, and not enough wiring to route the WAN connection to where the
> server is now and then back to the patch panel in the comms room to
> distribute throughout the flat.
>

Without knowing the exact cabling arrangement, have you considered buying a
small switch that understands vlan? Then you could do some trickery with
that to have your server elsewhere (with just one ethernet cable)?

>
> The next best would be to replace it with a small Soekris style box
> running BSD that can fit in the comms room - but how to know what will
> be sufficient, or even where the bottlenecks would be - is it pps that
> is the issue, or is NAT at high throughput going to be a problem? And
> how to measure my current usage?
>
We haven't done any testing of the different NAT solutions available so I
can't give any specific numbers there. But I don't think it will help
throughput, especially old school natd in userspace.

A colleague of mine also has 1Gbit/s home, and he hade to tweak the
settings and buy a decent intel card to get 900+Mbit/s on his old dell
entry level desktop.

>
> If I'm "filling" my GigE, then it is probably because I am downloading
> something, which means it's unlikely to be hundreds of thousands of
> small packets, right?
>

Sure, they shouldn't be.

Best regards
Andreas


> Talk about first world problems!
>
> Cheers
>
> Tom
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