Fred Reimer wrote: > Why, exactly? Performance of the firewall? Yes. I have two identical networks setup for one company in two different locations. One has a Cisco router (said 7200) talking upstream to a big WAN pipe and downstream to two gigabit ethernet networks. The second location has the same WAN and LAN configuration, WAN line distance and quality measurement numbers, etc. The only difference it is a BSD PC. The Cisco performs noticeably and measurably better in latency and throughput. Neither is running firewall code.
Now, the BSD PC has gobs more processor horsepower, memory- and bus-bandwidth. Why should the Cisco outperform it? To find out, I wanted to set up a selection of scenarios in the lab. (1) I wanted to try setting up the firewall between the "internal" gigabit network and the 7200. (2) I then wanted to setup the firewall between the WAN interface and the router to see how that performs. (3) I wanted to setup what I described in my original message, with the firewall performing only stateful inspection functions, and allowing the router to perform packet switching functions without interference from the firewall once the session is operating. As far as I can see, the advantage of (1) is that traffic heading to the "external" gigabit LAN wouldn't come across the firewall PC. However, the disadvantage would be that traffic between the two LANs would have to pass through it. That might be unacceptable. The advantage of (2) might be that traffic between the "internal" and "external" LANs wouldn't come near the firewall PC. Also, the WAN pipe may not require the throughput advantage of the Cisco. (It may indeed, but it might not be as sensitive.) However, this does add a couple dozen ms to the latency of the upstream connection. As far as I can tell, (3) would be the best of both worlds, but I, for the life of me, can't figure out if there's a way to set a network up like that. Any ideas? Peace... Sridhar > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sridhar Ayengar > Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 1:31 PM > To: Masood Ahmad Shah > Cc: 'Cisco NSPs' > Subject: Re: [c-nsp] External Firewall > > Masood Ahmad Shah wrote: >> Normally people would put like show below.. >> >> WAN-Router<--------->Firewall<------>LAN-Switch > > That's what I was hoping to avoid. > > Peace... Sridhar > _______________________________________________ > cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] > https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp > archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/ _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
