P1-200MMX 256MB vs. AMD Duron 1300 512MB

Master One

I have two old machines sitting around here, and was just wondering, how far I would get with these.

The job is not too fancy:

2048/512 ADSL external line (PPPoE)
SOHO LAN with some servers + workstations + laptops (incl. asterisk VoIP & mlDonkey bittorrent), but two NICs will do (Internet, LAN, no need for a DMZ I guess)
Requires routing, filtering, shaping, dnsmasq with dhcpd, squid, snort don't know (if it's useful, either give it a try now or in the future), most likely 3 or 4 IPsec or OpenVPN tunnels

From what I've read so far, the P1-200MMX may not be suited except doing only the basic stuff, but even the Duron 1300 with 512MB may not be enough once you want to try snort?

Any ideas, how both mentioned machines would perform, and what they would be capable of?

I think I'll try out pfSense 1.2-beta1 on the AMD Duron machine, but any suggestions are welcome.

I didn't come very far reading docs about pfSense, so I wonder, if there is any solution for:

installing pfSense on a software-raid1 (both machines have each two identical IDE harddrives)
using squid + privoxy + tor for content/ad-filtering & anonymous webaccess

hoba

The P1 is definately too slow for what you want to do. The Duron should be fine. However snort might require more RAM depending on the memory optimization you select and how many rules you enable.

mbedyn

I confirm this… CPU speed doesn't matter at all, untill you do not have to many client in LAN network, but the size of RAM memory is according to the rule "the bigger is better" 8)
Good assumption is at least 1Gb for snort.

cmb

I'm not sure why the consensus seems to be that Snort needs 1 GB RAM. I'm running it with 512 MB, enabled all rules, and don't use half of that 512 MB without ever touching swap. I'm not saying you won't need a gig, but it's worth trying with 512 MB because it works fine for me at that.

sullrich

It depends on the classifier type and how many rules are enabled.

Master One

Ok, after some chatting on the Freenode channel and your replies I am convinced to forget about snort, and go for the Duron 1300 512MB machine.

One other thing I couldn't find an answer to: I have 5 public IP addresses on my 2048/512 ADSL. Can these be managed by pfSense?

hoba

Yes, you use firewall>virtual IPs for that.