Re: [High Speed Firewalls]

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Paul Boyer, sie wrote:
[...]
> Note that Linux on a single high end PC can do more than a PIX for a
> small part of the price.
> Linux now supports 1000bT cards pretty well, so you can expect a full
> featured Gb/s firewall on Linux within a few months, for less than the
> price of the switch you'll plug it in !
>
> My company sells right now firewall boxes on linux that can handle 150
> Mb/s throughput (cumulated on all interfaces).
[...]

So how do you plan to get 1000Mb/s through it ?

There's a *big* difference in the way things like the Alteon, etc, are
designed, when compared to a PC.  Having a 1GHz P-III or Althon won't
necessarily help either.

1GB/s is seriously hard to send/receieve at for any general purpose
hardware such as a PC or Unix server/workstation.

Darren