View Single Post
Old 23rd January 2009
ai-danno's Avatar
ai-danno ai-danno is offline
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Boca Raton, Florida
Posts: 284
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by JMJ_coder View Post
But, would it affect network performance?
Not at average residential speeds. As a real-world example, here's my current setup-

- L2 unmanaged switch
- ADSL router with NAT (connected to switch and ISP)
- Desktop (connected to switch)
- OBSD box (connected to switch)


The Desktop gets a DHCP address (MAC-controlled) from the OBSD box that points it to the OBSD box for routing. The OBSD box is just a one-armed (single nic) NAT translator. The OBSD box picks up the packets from the Desktop, translates and filters them, then routes them out to the ADSL router, which NATs the packets one more time before routing them on to my ISP.

It's not the most network-efficient setup- but I have seen zero performance problems. I will eventually scale down what the ADSL router does in favor of the OBSD box (read: PPOE, NAT) and re-do the OBSD box with two nics, but for now, it's fine.

The OBSD box also fulfills the following functions with no discernible network latency-

- Cacti graphing
- DNS
- NTP
- IDS (with Snort/BASE)
- web server
- db server

... and will soon take on VPN services and IPS (snort2c). All with no network performance issues at all so far.
__________________
Network Firefighter
Reply With Quote