I'm testing my vpn here. Right now I'm transfering some mp3's over the connection. (I'm also cc'ing the euglug to peak some interest. I'm using a FreeS/WAN ipsec vpn between my home system and my linux firewall at work. www.freeswan.org) I have a 256k line (theoretical max 32kb/sec)(cable at home). I'm copying over an smb (slow windows file sharing) from "cory1" windows workstation to "neptune" linux server. Then using an encrypted ssh tunnel, the data goes from neptune to firewall where the data enters into a second tunnel encrypted with ipsec, across the internet to my home computer where it is decrypted from the ipsec tunnel, then decrypted from the ssh tunnel, then untarred (like pkzip without compression), then written as a file. I'm not stopping to make files in between, nor doing one step at a time. The files exist only in two places: 1) my windows workstation at work, and 2) my linux cory@home system. The files are being copied from one computer to the other. At the highest level, it looks like a simple file transfer between two computers. There is some crazy stuff going on though at more involved levels. The mp3's on my windows workstation are travelling 3 logical hops (and many physical hops over the internet) to get here, plus the double encryption and decryptions take some processing power and time, and mp3's aren't easily compressable being already compressed, so I'd say 26kb/sec would be pretty good and reasonable to expect. cory1 ..... neptune ----- firewall ===== (internet) ===== cory@home ..... unencrypted smb windows filesharing ----- encrypted ssh tunnel ===== encrypted ssh tunnel inside of an encrypted ipsec tunnel The ----- tunnel goes from neptune to cory@home, but only the firewall-cory@home portion is encapsulated in a second encrypted tunnel (the ipsec vpn). From firewall to neptune the tunnel is only singly encrypted via ssh. I did not have much success with using smbfs to mount cory1 from cory@home. While it worked, a 400k file transfer took far, far too long. I suspect it is the protocol. I'm now receiving at 32.2kb/sec and sending at 1.3kb/sec total 33.5kb/sec! The vpn can do that because there is compression involved. I'm actually very surpised at the performance through the line. I'm timing how long it takes to transfer 59.5mb of mp3's over this setup: cory@c1052719-a:~/mp3$ time ssh neptune "tar c pd/mp3/classical/Beethoven\ -\ 9th\ Symphony\ *" | tar x real 33m16.602s user 1m4.830s sys 0m12.500s this says: On cory@home, run (and time) 'ssh neptune' (ie connect the console to neptune) Then on neptune, tar up 4 beethoven mp3's on a mounted directory 'pd' which is actually the windows fileshare on cory1. Output all of that back to cory@home. Then take that output and untar it and create those 4 beethoven mp3s. Actual file throughput minus all encrypted traffic control data, checking my email and other traffic: 59449kb of mp3's 59449 / (33*60+16.6) 29kb file throughput When does your 768kb line come in? Since windows protocols were designed inefficiently, your win2k client may not get as efficient performance results, but that 768k line will help. Cory
