smoothwall/pfsense hardware question

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schnell

Gawd
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Jul 22, 2005
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I am going to set up either a smoothwall or a pfsense firewall/router.

My question is how much processor and memory would i need to serve anywhere from 20-30 pc's?

I have read the sites and it says what will work but it does not say how much processing power you need per user. I would assume that while it will run on just about anything the more the better to a certain extent.

Traffic will be anywhere from normal web and email to bit torrent, ftp and the like.
 
even a p2 has equal to or more than a linksys router....i always use p2's for mono/smoothwall setups. I know of a guy who runs a school's gateway off of monowall (around 200 pcs) which is a 600mhz p4 i believe....ive even heard of guy running them off of regular ol pentiums, they dont require much at all really.
 
Kaos said:
even a p2 has equal to or more than a linksys router....i always use p2's for mono/smoothwall setups. I know of a guy who runs a school's gateway off of monowall (around 200 pcs) which is a 600mhz p4 i believe....ive even heard of guy running them off of regular ol pentiums, they dont require much at all really.
Click to expand...
Probably a 600MHz P3, not a P4.
 
I was planning on snaggin an old p3 ~600-800mhz with about 512mb of ram

I would prefer it to be a little overkill if anything.

Does either have support for dual processors?
 
I don't think smoothwall does, as for pfsense, I'm not sure. I would check their site (and forum/faq if they have one) to find out.
 
I use smoothwall at home and have several smoothie boxen at work governing various networks throughout the campus ..and what you need as far as specs depends on what type of mods you want to run on the smoothie .. if just a firewall/gatewall , then a pentium 223mmx with 64megs of ram, 2 gb hdd is plenty for 30 comps ..

Now a P3 600 w/512megs of ram (drool :) ) would give you the oomph to run just about any mod (Dansguardian w/clam av ..Guardian reactive firewall ..etc) on your smoothie

Our main smoothie box is an XP +1600 with 512megs DDR 20gb hdd (7200rpm) and 100+ comps run thru it out to net and it runs:
Dansguardian w/Clamav with Urlblacklist' bigblacklist for urlfilter blockage
Connview (shows all connections to your smoothie)
Full Firewall Control
Snort 2.4
DNSmasq update
Blocklist manager
oinkmaster (auto snort update)
various logging type mods
..and some others that I cant think of right now
spyware/virus problems pretty much non-existant now that we started using DG (yay for those that still like to click on .exe email attachments :rolleyes: )

My smoothie that governs over my computer lab that I run is just a P3 500 with 198meg sdram & 4gb hdd ,with above mods and alot more (I'm the testing ground for smoothie mods before we put them on our main smoothie) .. I have 12 win2k boxes , a K12 Linux Terminal Server (Fed core 4) and 12 thin-clients that go out thru it without a hitch

...there is alot you can add to a smoothie box , unfortunately there forums are under maintanence right now ...if you go the smoothie route, make sure to download the fixes 1 thru 8 iso , makes it way quicker to setup your smoothwall box


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schnell said:
Does either have support for dual processors?
Click to expand...

smoothwall doesnt as of right now , and not needed really. It uses the 2.4 linux kernel , so you could recompile the kernel with smp support if you wanted to I guess. You would get more benefit out of adding more memory more than dual processor support me thinks ..with smoothwall anyways.

:)


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clarkconnect supports SMP.

the processor is of less consequence than the amount and speed of ram. your state table and rule set should be resident in ram. any other add-ons you run will want to use the ram as well, but none of them are like folding proteins or anything and will not tax the processor that much.
 
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