[SunHELP] Solaris as firewall for windows network

[Thomas Cameron]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kurt Huhn" <kurt at k-huhn.com>
To: "The SunHELP List" <sunhelp at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 11:21 AM
Subject: Re: [SunHELP] Solaris as firewall for windows network


> On Feb 11, 2004, at 12:03 PM, Javier O. Augusto wrote:
>
> >
> > IMHO, its useless to setup a machine like an U10 only for a firewall.
> > Why not a freebsd or a linux firewall instead?
> >
>
> Speaking from experience, the hardware of most PCs can't keep up with
> the abuse that can be tossed at a firewall.  My experience sending
> aggressive nmap scans through a 1.3Ghz celeron running OpenBSD, is that
> the system simply falls down.  A 140Mhz Ultra-1 running OpenBSD, on the
> other hand, performs flawlessly.
>
> Not to start *that* particular holy war, but my experience guides my
> actions in this regard.

YMMV, because I've used a 600 MHz PC running Linux as a firewall for a
company with 120 users on a T1 for several years with zero unscheduled
downtime.  Scheduled downtime has involved maybe 5 or 6 reboots for kernel
updates since late 2001.

My experience says that a PC is just fine.

Thomas