On Sun, May 06, 2007 at 05:10:19PM +0200, Henning Brauer wrote:
> * [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2007-05-04 09:12]:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have some time to come up with a new firewall/router/vpn solution
> > for our datacentre, and I'm considering a shiny new server with
> > OpenBSD and pf instead of a costly PIX. On the part of our network
> > that I'm doing this for we might see maximum 20Mbit/s unencrypted
> > traffic.
> > 
> > Is anyone using an OpenBSD/pf solution in a production environment
> > like this? What hardware are you using? How's it holding up? :-)
> 
> for breakfast, yeah.
> 
> with reasonable network cards and a reasonable ruleset pretty much any 
> system made in the last, what, make it 2 years, should able to do 
> several hundred MBit/s.
> 
> the max I have going thru an OpenBSD box at a customer is in the 750 
> MBit/s range (and that doesn't max out the machine), but that is 
> without pf and a carefully hand-crafted kernel.
> 
> with pf, not sure where i have the biggest install... there's certainly 
> customers in the 50 MBit/s range where the machines mostly idle. 
> usually performance is just not a problem, so I don't look at these 
> numbers to closely...

Three years ago, I ran PF/altq in a datacenter on crap hardware.  We
handled 60-90Mb/s easily, with a default block policy and extensive
ALTQ CBQ throttling.  While I optimized the rules as per the PF FAQ, I
did no kernel customization, no tweaking, no so-called optimizations.
See this link:

http://www.oreillynet.com/sysadmin/blog/2004/05/bsd_success_stories_1.html

Look at the story "BSD in a Panic," that was me.

The machine in question was, IIRC, a P500, 256 MB RAM.  Once the panic
was over, I wound up installing pfflowd as well.  The machine was
*still* mostly idle.  I thought about putting DNS on it as well but
decided that would be pushing my luck.

OpenBSD and PF rock, hands-down.  I've moved on from that employer
now, but I *still* use OpenBSD/PF whenever I can.  Frequently, to
replace PIX solutions that just don't handle the load...

==ml

-- 
Michael W. Lucas        [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
                http://www.BlackHelicopters.org/~mwlucas/
            Latest book: PGP & GPG -- http://www.pgpandgpg.com
On 5/4/2007, the TSA kept 3 pairs of my soiled undies "for security reasons."

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