Options for a 24-port firewall?

Sat Oct 29 19:20:05 PDT 2005

hi ya michael

On Sat, 29 Oct 2005, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> > On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 01:21:53PM -0700, Michael T.Halligan wrote:
> >
> >> I'm sitting around, analyzing my firewall needs. My needs are pretty
> >> simple. I need to be able to throw a lot of customers on their own
> >> 100mb firewall ports. Most customers
> >> will never use more than about 3 mb/s. Given this, I expect the
> >> overall throughput for 24 customers, given some flux, to be about
> >> 150mb/s.  Ideally, I'd love to throw Linux or
> >> OpenBSD onto a box that has 1/2 dozen quad ethernet cards.. I'd also

motherboards with 6-pci slots is harder to find but if you're not
locked to a particular cpu or mb vendor .. its doable ..

yo'd probably want pci-x instead and there's probably not many 
choices of mb for 4x or 6x 64-bit pci slot motherboards ..

openbsd would be better os

> >> like to keep the budget per firewall under $7.5k, which rules out any
> >> commerical solution.

i'd go for 2 machines instead of 1 ... 
and seems doable for the budget .. except for the "time for home brew" :-)

c ya
alvin

- to make things more fun .. i'm looking to build a custom 24-port gigE
  or at least take off the plastics and stick it inside my box for "demo"