On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 9:07 PM, Paul Gear <p...@gear.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Server hardware: IBM x3550, Xeon E5405 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 2 x 300 GB 10K > RPM SAS HD in hardware RAID 1, 2 x Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5708 > 1000Base-T (B2) > About two weeks ago I had to put into production a temporary hacked together server as my primary firewall. I used a spare Dell PE1750 (32-bit Xeon processor) which had two broadcom gig-e on-board, and added in a cheap-o 100baseTX card to use as the WAN port. This solution worked really well until such time that the WAN was saturated at about 98Mbps. At that time, one of the broadcom NICs would lock up and get reset on a watchdog timeout. This conveniently caused failover to the other pfSense box sync'd with it (which unfortunately could not handle the load). pfSense never auto-switched back -- I had to manually re-run one of the rc scripts to reset everything. After that, I splurged on an Intel gig-e NIC for the WAN, and everything was stable again. No more watchdogs on the bge NIC. Both of these have since been replaced with a pair of Silicon Mechanics R101 boxes with low-power-consumption Xeon CPUs. These have been working very nicely to push upwards of 170Mbps for sustained periods of a few hours at a time. CPU load < 8%, and sucking down very little power at the same time. They have 4x Intel NICs in them.
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