On Fri, 28 Jan 2000, Bill said: > Hi. I have a question about how powerful my firewall computer should > be. > > I want to make a firewall for a small constellation of computers > in my living room. Behind the firewall I will have two Win98 computers, > one computer which boots Win98 or several flavors of Unix/Linux, and > one Hurd box. This system will be entirely single user at any one > time, though there may be different users. The network application > will mostly be using VPN software to use Outlook and downloading > source files through a CM system. Think of it as using CVS on a > 1.0e6 line SW project, with 10 or so engineers making changes. I > will need to fetch changed files from the internal network. > > I have an old 486DX120 machine which needs memory. I was planning > to put 32Mb in it and letting it be the firewall. The two Win98 > machines are on one subnet, and one hub, and everything else is > on a second hub and subnet, so the firewall box will handle > routing between the two subnets. I need this to work this way for > the VPN on the Win98 machines. The other machines are not involved > in the VPN at all. > > Does this computer seem reasonably powerful? > Should be, I did a similar thing about a year ago with a 486DX66 and it seemed to do the job without any real problems. I replaced it with a IBM/Cyrix 6x86 PR233 with 64M of ram and a small but adequate hd, built from cheap parts and "junk" parts (total cost was about $175), running a web cache as well. I probably could have run squid on the 486, but as I was going to change the hd anyway, I saw no reason not to build the new machine.
-ptw-
