RE: Virtual firewalls

[Bryce Stenberg]

Hi,   Are you now plugged into a hub instead of a switch?  Or somehow listening in promiscuous mode on the network adapter? Otherwise, your network adapter, if into a switch should only be seeing traffic destined just for it, and some broadcast traffic.   Regards,   Bryce Stenberg From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kerry Mayes Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2006 9:52 AM To: linux-users@it.canterbury.ac.nz Subject: Virtual firewalls   I've been using virtual machines a fair bit at work, my laptop is fairly slow and the company has some machines that are required to be around as backups so have lots of spare capacity almost all of the time. One thing which really speeds these up is to turn off all the firewalling and virus checking.  To feel comfortable with this, I put them all behind a virtual firewall (pfsense) so they only have access to the work fileserver and a printer.  No external access at all.  All was working well until the network was reconfigured.  It seems that the machine I'm running all these vms on was on a seperately switched subnet.  Now it is connected to the main network directly and my firewall is now seeing (and processing) all the companies network traffic.  Suddenly, instead of sitting ticking over with minimal drain on clock cycles, it is using 30% of a processor. (The machine is a dual core Xeon so it is using a sixth of the capacity of a powerful machine). Is there anyway of reducing the drain on resources?  I think there may be no answer to this, as I understand it the machine has to look at every packet that arrives to check whether to do anything.  Am I right? Cheers Kerry.