C200 as a firewall

[Jose Goyana_3]

Hi Gurus!
I need to set up an IPFilter firewall and I'd like to use this C200 machine with HP-UX 11.11. I'll need to plug extra NICs to provide the necessary 5 extra FastEthernet links. From this total of 6 interfaces, 5 will be assigned to intranet links and 1 for the 2 Mbps Internet link. The agregate traffic for intranet links is not so high today but tend to increase in the future.
What do you all think about it? Do you believe its single 200 MHz processor could be this firewall's main bottleneck? Does this C200 have a good chipset, allowing it to have smooth performance?
Than you all!

Jose

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Jose,

In the wintel 32 bit world the threashold for processor bottleneck with such dedicated configurations is 700 MegaHertz.

PA-RISC takes substantially less clock speed to do the same amount of work. I think you are probably all right on that.


I'm not sure this device has enough slots to handle the number of NIC cards you wish to put in. You must use HP certified cards in PA-RISC systems and not every slot that the card will fit in will let the card work.

That being said, I think you will probably see the cpu is pretty close to idle during the actual operation of this system.

It would be substantially easier to do this with a PC or old Rack Mount server, Linux and firestarter a firewall configuration product.

I know the software licensing fees would be zero.

SEP

[Torsten.]

Be aware of the available slots:

2 64bit PCI, 3.3V
2 32bit PCI, 5V

The problem might be to find the right NICs for this.