So, the more I look at various ways to lay out my infrastructure, the more I am thinking about specs for hardware.
Starting with firewalling.
How does one determine the specs for a firewall?
What I mean is:
1. motherboard/CPU - p4? Dual-Core? Intel i3, i5, i7?
2. RAM? 4gb? 8gb? More? 32gb?
3. Obviously GB Nics!
I am bring about 300gb of traffic a month right now and I expect that to increase significantly with my next offerings.
Obviously one answer is to but a beefy motherboard that supports lots of RAM and add more as needed, but where does one start out?
How do I know if my firewall would need more RAM?
How do I know if the CPU is good enough?
I still go back to my Cisco PIX days where these devices were amazing on just 256MB of RAM. We piloted a large chunk of Cornell University's Lab Of Ornithology on 2 of these, but now-a-days it seems that a PIX would not be good enough. Is it because the nature of the internet and data and attacks has changed over time? more aggressive?
-Jason
On 01/17/12 3:36 PM, Jason T. Slack-Moehrle wrote:
So, the more I look at various ways to lay out my infrastructure, the more I am thinking about specs for hardware.
Starting with firewalling.
How does one determine the specs for a firewall?
What I mean is:
motherboard/CPU - p4? Dual-Core? Intel i3, i5, i7?
RAM? 4gb? 8gb? More? 32gb?
Obviously GB Nics!
I am bring about 300gb of traffic a month right now and I expect that to increase significantly with my next offerings.
Obviously one answer is to but a beefy motherboard that supports lots of RAM and add more as needed, but where does one start out?
How do I know if my firewall would need more RAM?
How do I know if the CPU is good enough?
a pure firewall at gigE speeds really doesn't need that much ram and only a fair-to-middling processor. more than 2 cores would likely be wasted. Its when you start layering other server functionality on top of the firewall system is when you need more hardware.
I'd expect with a firewall-centric OS distribution like pfSense, a dual core 2-3Ghz I3 could easily keep up with gigE and quite complex rule sets, several network zones. No storage requirements at all, unless you plan on keeping your logging local on the firewall. to maintain gigE throughput you'll want to use server grade NICs and not cheap desktop ones. If you're using a lot of VPN encryption, more and/or faster CPU cores would be useful. a few 100MB of ram is plenty for 100s of 1000s of concurrent connections, so unless you're doing other ram intensive stuff like Snort or NetTop, 1GB ram would be plenty.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 6:52 PM, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
a pure firewall at gigE speeds really doesn't need that much ram and only a fair-to-middling processor. more than 2 cores would likely be wasted. Its when you start layering other server functionality on top of the firewall system is when you need more hardware.
I'd expect with a firewall-centric OS distribution like pfSense, a dual core 2-3Ghz I3 could easily keep up with gigE and quite complex rule sets, several network zones. No storage requirements at all, unless you plan on keeping your logging local on the firewall. to maintain gigE throughput you'll want to use server grade NICs and not cheap desktop ones. If you're using a lot of VPN encryption, more and/or faster CPU cores would be useful. a few 100MB of ram is plenty for 100s of 1000s of concurrent connections, so unless you're doing other ram intensive stuff like Snort or NetTop, 1GB ram would be plenty.
pfSense and Vyatta are both excellent platforms to build a firewall on. Vyatta has a command line interface and IPv6 support. pfSense has a web interface with good rrd graphs. Give them both a try and see what works best. There is always the Cisco ASA 5510 if you can deal with the price tag. I've hit a bug once or twice in Vyatta where a config change didn't work until I rebooted. I haven't had that happen with Cisco.
I have been using Vyatta with a Supermicro Atom D525 motherboard, dual port Intel gigabit nic, 2GB of memory, and 4GB Transcend SSD. If you go with the Supermicro front I/O case the bottom holes of a 40mm fan will line up with the vent in the back of the case. I know these are rated to run without a fan, but even a low airflow fan will drop the CPU 20-30F. You can build one of these for around $550 and the power usage comes in at 21 watts.
If you need encryption the Core i5 and higher have the AES instruction set. The list of supporting software is on the wiki below. Openssl is on the list with patches, not sure if an official build with these has been released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set
Ryan
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:24 -0500, Ryan Wagoner wrote:
---- something to keep in mind... wikipedia will be dark Wednesday, Jan 18th on account of their joining the stop SOPA protest.
for the next 32 hours, linky goodness might be less than goodness.
Craig
On 01/17/12 6:38 PM, Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:24 -0500, Ryan Wagoner wrote:
something to keep in mind... wikipedia will be dark Wednesday, Jan 18th on account of their joining the stop SOPA protest.
for the next 32 hours, linky goodness might be less than goodness.
rumor has it, the mobile wiki stays up..
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/?useformat=mobile
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:51 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
On 01/17/12 6:38 PM, Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:24 -0500, Ryan Wagoner wrote:
something to keep in mind... wikipedia will be dark Wednesday, Jan 18th on account of their joining the stop SOPA protest.
for the next 32 hours, linky goodness might be less than goodness.
rumor has it, the mobile wiki stays up..
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/?useformat=mobile
---- appears to be the case (mobile functions, normal web doesn't).
By the way, a trip to the regular Wikipedia site is useful in that it provides an easy path for those in the US to contact their elected representatives.
Craig
On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 05:44 -0700, Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:51 -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
On 01/17/12 6:38 PM, Craig White wrote:
On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 20:24 -0500, Ryan Wagoner wrote:
something to keep in mind... wikipedia will be dark Wednesday, Jan 18th on account of their joining the stop SOPA protest.
for the next 32 hours, linky goodness might be less than goodness.
rumor has it, the mobile wiki stays up..
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/ http://en.m.wikipedia.org/?useformat=mobile
appears to be the case (mobile functions, normal web doesn't).
By the way, a trip to the regular Wikipedia site is useful in that it provides an easy path for those in the US to contact their elected representatives.
Craig
You can still access wiki articles: the pages load normally, only there is a script at the end that redirect them to 'dark page'. Reloading the page then stopping the load (stop, esc) before running the script let me read the article I was looking for.
HTH,
On Wed, January 18, 2012 00:52, John R Pierce wrote:
I'd expect with a firewall-centric OS distribution like pfSense, a dual core 2-3Ghz I3 could easily keep up with gigE and quite complex rule sets, several network zones. No storage requirements at all, unless you plan on keeping your logging local on the firewall. to maintain gigE throughput you'll want to use server grade NICs and not cheap desktop ones. If you're using a lot of VPN encryption, more and/or faster CPU cores would be useful. a few 100MB of ram is plenty for 100s of 1000s of concurrent connections, so unless you're doing other ram intensive stuff like Snort or NetTop, 1GB ram would be plenty.
pfsense will generally run just fine without any swapping with 160Mb of memory. I'd recommend no more than 256Mb.
Dear Jason,
On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:36:09 -0800 "Jason T. Slack-Moehrle" slackmoehrle@gmail.com wrote:
How does one determine the specs for a firewall?
Depends on your requirements. If you just want some port filtering/forwarding it can be done by low power Atom machines or even some old hardware (Pentium 2 possibly even older). ARM, MIPS are also fine but check if your software/OS runs on that very special architecture. If it is a mission critical firewall I'd recommend buying new hardware instead of reusing your ten year old Pentium 3. If you need new memory it's often cheaper to buy 8 GB of RAM instead of 1, 2 or 4GB nowadays.
Don't skimp on network adapters! 10$ adapters are usually not built for 24/7 usage.
If you want to do deep packet inspection, (i.e. antispam, antivirus, etc.) you should invest in decent (!) hardware.
If you'd like to access your firewall remotely you should consider a remote management card like ILO, DRAC.
UPS, diesel motor, failover cluster, how much money do you have? ;-)
Brgds
-
Benjamin Hackl -
Craig White -
Giles Coochey -
Jason T. Slack-Moehrle -
John R Pierce -
kalinix -
Ryan Wagoner