Gigabit thoughput harware requirements
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I want to build a firewall that will be able to push my gigabit network to the limit. I do a lot of large file transfers over the network and most of my machine already have Gb nics.
The firewall will have 4 nics: internet, server, clients and a wifi subnet. Internet will be 24mbit adsl2+with an effective throughput of around 21mbit. I'll do a lot of traffiic shaping on the internet interface and a DMZ between clients and server. also the wifi subnet will use vpn.What hardware would i need for my firewall on a network like mine?
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You need a lot of horsepower for this. First use nics that don't burn too much of your CPU time. Intel should be fine. As the traffic has to pass the PCI-bus you need a really fast one. PCI-X with appropriate cards should perform best. Trafficshaping and VPN is depending on CPU power. pfSense supports multiprocessor systems, so you might want to use more than one processor.
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Check out the high-end pci-x and pci-e nexcom boxes. I have a feeling you will want the dual xeon model.