<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/18/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">David Brodbeck</b> <<a href="mailto:gull@gull.us">gull@gull.us</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
I'm posting this here because you folks have lots of experience with<br>quiet but powerful boxes. Please forgive the off-topic excursion.<br><br>I need to build a firewall to sit between two gigabit ethernet<br>networks. It's going to be physically located in a classroom /
<br>computer lab, so it also needs to be quiet. Can anyone suggest some<br>hardware that would give good performance in this application without<br>a lot of noise? Gigabit is pretty demanding of the bus architecture<br>
and CPU. (One rack-mount server I have uses 40% of its 2 GHz CPU<br>just for interrupt handling, when it's shipping packets between its<br>two gigabit interfaces at full clip.)<br><br>_______________________________________________
</blockquote><br>I dont know if these can handle full gigabit speed <a href="http://www.liantec.com/">http://www.liantec.com/</a> , there are some benchmarks at <a href="http://www.kd85.com/liantec.html">http://www.kd85.com/liantec.html
</a>, the ones with intel nics might just do it with a very recent linux kernel, there have been some improvements recently I believe.<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.
<br><br>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.<br><br>Andy<br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>