So a little while ago I made the discovery that Sydney Uni (which I happen to attend) had a reasonably recent mirror of debian. I decided that this was a great chance for me to upgrade the debian install on my firewall (mostly so I could get a 2.4 kernel, which I ended up not getting after a dist-upgrade, and turned out to be about 5 days of messing around to get working, but these are tangential issues).
After a week of fooling around with random things my firewall is now running debian 3.0 with kernel 2.4.18 and doing minimalist firewalling, NATting and port forwarding with iptables. So far so good, and the iptables interface is much nicer than the old ipchains/ipmasqadm set up I had. My problem is that the new firewall set up runs quite literally half as fast as the old configuration. I have no idea why. By this I mean that the download from mirror.aarnet I'm currently doing (which as I understand it is routed through sydney uni's connection to aarnet and just a few days ago was running at 5k/s) is running at about 2.4k/s. Unintersting information about my firewall: 56k net connection. 3c509 network card 486DX40 processor. 16MB RAM. 32MB swap. vanishingly small hard drives. no other drives. unused VLB video card of some description. The machine runs sshd, iptable-ey stuff, pppd, dhcpd and well.. that's about all. I do know that apt-get broke my pppd configuration by replacing my /etc/ppp/options (which it strongly recommended that it do). That's fixed now, and I let it keep most of the options it wanted to set since I figured it would have a good reason for making such a recommendation. But why is my connection so slow? Any pointers would be much appreciated. James. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
