gateway configuration

[Glenn Dawson]

At 02:13 PM 8/7/2005, steve lasiter wrote:
>I am researching and accumulating information on
>setting up my small office network and using a FreeBSD
>Gateway/Firewall as my entry point. I am seeking
>general FreeBSD advise, know problems, and input on
>this topic. I currently have all the equipment up and
>configured and now I'm tying it all together.
>
>The computer I will be setting up as the the Gateway
>has FreeBSD 5.4 and is a PII 400MHz with 256MB Ram and
>9 Gig HDD. I plan on putting two new ethernet cards in
>to ensure quality. Any advice on whether this seems
>sufficient if this machine is only serving as a
>Gateway. I understand a lot will depend on my rules
>and traffic so I may up the ram, or get another pc for
>it based on advice received here. Also, should I put a
>gigabit Ethernet card in my Gateway?-see below topic.

Having gigabit ethernet on your gateway/firewall is a bit of waste.  Unless 
of course you have a gigabit link to the internet.


>I recently bought two new Dual Pentium 1.2GHz with
>SCSI's and both have gigabit ethernet ports along with
>the standard ethernet ports. I have the SMP Kenel
>configured and the boxes ready to go as a
>mail/web/database server and the other as a streaming
>video/ftp server. I have six boxes total and will be
>adding more. What is going to be the best way to take
>advantage of the gigabit ethernet ports on the big
>dual boxes?

Assuming those machines are primarily used to provide services across the 
internet, gigabit ethernet doesn't do you any good.

If you're planning on moving a lot of data around locally, then gigabit 
would certainly make things faster.

>I read that FreeBSD had some issues with
>the gigabit ethernets earlier, are there still
>outstanding issues?

I've used some of the Intel gigabit cards without any problems.  Don't know 
if others have problems or not.

>Should I upgrade the other PC's to
>gigabit ethernet cards in order to take advantage of
>this or should I buy a switch with both port types and
>just mix and match?

Same as above.  Moving lots of data locally would benefit from that, 
otherwise just use what the machines have now.

-Glenn


>I'm sure one of you out there has worked these issue
>at some point and I need the usual expert advice I
>have consistently received from you guys.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Dean Lasiter