Andrew C Burnette wrote:
> Paul M wrote:
>> I am using tested hardware: a single core2duo with 2GB memory on Tyan
>> motherboard with pairs of 250G sata  (memo to self, discover how to do
>> mirroring).
> nice -n- peppy I bet.

it was actually one of the lowest spec machines our supplier could
provide - I think each was about GBP700 (US$1400).

> My PIII 550Mhz w/ 512Mbytes of old sdram on a lousy i810 chipset barely
> sweats at 30Mbps and 6k connections. :-)  I would rate pfsense (and of

I think ours is more than a bit overspecced - with four giga nics and a
100baseT for sync (the tyan has twin gigas and the 100baseT) it should
be enough to handle most things... all the servers are gigE, and with a
pair of Cisco 3560E to provide internal wire-speed giga switching should
allow us to pump a lot of data around!

> Good idea is to pop in Intel nic cards. (shhh, big secret, they sell
> 'server cards' with identical everything for 2x-3x the price, so buy the

I found that twin PCI-X gigE's are a bit pricey, whether IBM/broadcom or
Intel, GBP150 (US$300), but since the firewalls are 1U there's only one
card slot.

Oh yeah, I booted linux and disabled power management on the
motherboard's nics which caused us a lot of grief on similar boxes when
running linux:
http://e1000.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Issues#82573.28V.2FL.2FE.29_TX_Unit_Hang_messages

> Also helps to have last year's motherboard chipset, as the newly
> released ones take a couple minor revs to be stable in some cases.

indeed!



Paul

Reply via email to