[luau] computer set-up advice

[MonMotha]

Watch out using comps with that little RAM for router/firewalls.  The 
ramdisk alone will use up 2-4MB of your RAM (assuming it uses a ramdisk, 
which it probably does for space reasons as ramdisk images can be 
compressed).  Then each conntrack entry (for iptables and stateful 
stuff) needs 600bytes, and you need some space to run userspace.

Minimum I've found to be really usable is 20MB of RAM for a stateful 
router/firewall.  ipchains, lacking the sophisticated connection 
tracking that the 2.4 netfilter (utilizing iptables) has, needs less RAM 
per connection (though it still has to track them if you're doing NAT), 
but then you have to sacrifice all the cool features of iptables.

If anyone wants it, I'm working on a single floppy firewall disk that 
also has all the QoS tools, vlan, tunnel, ipv6, bonding, etc tools that 
you normally only find on multiple disk routers, or routers with some 
form of larger storage (cdrom based, hard drive, flash, etc).  It's 
pretty rudimentary currently (doesn't even have a way to remotely access 
as I don't have sshd on it), but it does at least work I think.

--MonMotha

Yuser wrote:
> On 17 Apr 2002 at 3:31, beesond001 at hawaii.rr.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>That way, your file server is behind the firewall, is 
>>fairly well protected, and is running on a relatively fast box that 
>>probably has a much faster I/O speed than the P200.  
>>
> 
> A P200 can do them all with little effort but like beesond001 stated, it is easier or safer or simply just provide piece of mind to configure a second box to run as the router.  
> You can make a router as simple as a floppy only (no HD, keyboard, or monitor) on a 486/8mb ram from a pre-built distribution like Freesco (www.freesco.org) or the LRP 
> (www.linuxrouter.org) or you could get a full machine and put a distribution on it.
> For Samba..I have a P200/128MB with a few large 5400rpm IDE drives acting as a Samba server and I can transfer roughly 4.5MB/sec between it and the Windows 
> machines.  During this transfer, load on the Linux machine is minimal, although the much more powerful 10K rpm SCSI disk Win machines are at 100% CPU.   Just for 
> reference.. I have a second Linux machine with Samba that is a P100/64MB ram with one really old 1.6GB SCSI.  I get roughly 3MB/sec with that one.  It has Squid 
> running and configured to take most of the resources so I imagine that slows it down somewhat.  Memory and disk I/O effect a file server more then CPU speed.  Bottom 
> line I guess is that a P200 would be adequate if that's what you have.
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