[mythtv-users] OT: Quiet hardware for gigabit firewall

Andrew Lyon andrew.lyon at gmail.com
Thu Jul 19 00:03:35 UTC 2007


On 7/18/07, David Brodbeck <gull at gull.us> wrote:
>
> I'm posting this here because you folks have lots of experience with
> quiet but powerful boxes.  Please forgive the off-topic excursion.
>
> I need to build a firewall to sit between two gigabit ethernet
> networks.  It's going to be physically located in a classroom /
> computer lab, so it also needs to be quiet.  Can anyone suggest some
> hardware that would give good performance in this application without
> a lot of noise?  Gigabit is pretty demanding of the bus architecture
> and CPU.  (One rack-mount server I have uses 40% of its 2 GHz CPU
> just for interrupt handling, when it's shipping packets between its
> two gigabit interfaces at full clip.)
>
> _______________________________________________


I dont know if these can handle full gigabit speed http://www.liantec.com/ ,
there are some benchmarks at http://www.kd85.com/liantec.html, the ones with
intel nics might just do it with a very recent linux kernel, there have been
some improvements recently I believe.

I have a sever at work that has dual onboard broadcom gigabit and 3 x intel
dual port gigabit pci express, those chipsets seem to work pretty good for a
firewall, 6 ports run gigabit speed and 2 100mb and the limiting factor is
the server disk speeds,i recently copied a  700mb iso image between two
windows 2003 boxes and it took about 6 seconds. I couldnt recommend the
server itself as its loud and expensive.

The Liantec Tiny Bus can take a 16x Pci Express Graphics Module, so perhaps
the 4 x Gigabit module is also PCI Express, and they do one with a Mobile
Core 2 Duo, if I wanted to build a quiet high performance gigabit firewall
thats the hardware I would be looking at.

If you do build something please let me know how you get on, I have a
similar requirement coming up in a few months time.

Andy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20070719/81bbd2cb/attachment.htm 


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list