Richard P. Koett wrote: > I'm setting up a Soekris net4801-50 (128 Mb RAM) for use as a firewall. For > storage it has a 40Gb IDE drive rather than compact flash. For my first > attempt I used a generic install of OpenBSD 3.9. The user complained that > Internet access seemed slow, however. I'm planning to try again using a > custom kernel based on the config file included with Chris Cappuccio's > Flashdist installer. (A copy is provided below for reference). Is this a good idea?
Are you using PPPOE in your setup ? It may be the culprit of your bad performance. I've setup 4 Soekris 4501 boxes as routers for small offices with an ADSL link to the Internet. For one of this installations, the ADSL link speed was above 1 Mb/s (8Mb/s), and when using the userland PPPOE the CPU load was around 75% and the available bandwith was poor. After modifying the configuration to use the kernel PPPOE instead, the CPU load and the available bandwith became normal. With ADSL links at 512kb/s I've not seen any difference in CPU load or throughputs between userland and kernel PPPOE. I've always used unmodified OpenBSD kernel with Soekris boxes. See: Kernel PPPOE: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pppoe&sektion=4 Userland PPPOE: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pppoe&&sektion=8
