Filtering and forwarding with 100mb?

[Nigel Morse]

> also save me money on switches and serve as routers. the 
> expected speed is
> 100mb full duplex between departments. (they surf the web, 

Ahh I see. 

> regular office environment).
> Is there a cpu/mb sec ratio. also i read in the previous 
> postings that there
> are better hardware 100mb ethernet cards for the job.

Well how often does it run at 100mb between departments? I have a similar
thing with a p166 32mB and 2 random 100mB cards and the speed is perfectly
acceptable to all concerned.   A simple test would be to take 2 machines
either side transfer files from one side to the other - this will give you
an idea of speed.

> Is there a minimum memory requirements or a limit on 
> concurrent connections.

I think this is in the FAQ. Each connection takes ~500 bytes of non-swapable
kernel memory for connection tracking. The default for you can be found by
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max.  And  echo 12345 >
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_max will change this.  On my 32mb system it
appears to be 2048 which I haven't hit yet.  It depends how much cross
network traffic you get.  

Cheers
Nigel