thus Pasi Kärkkäinen spake: > On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 09:36:57PM +0200, sadas sadas wrote: >> I will explain more deeply. I need to deploy a firewall(s) in front of web >> server farm because I need to do billing - I will use CentOS with iptables >> + ipset to store a list if my clients so when client doesn't pay his >> server's IP is out of the list and he can't access the web server. >> >> Second - I know that iptables is very heavy and it's not recommended to >> use it in gigabit firewall but I don't have a choice as far as I know only >> ipset works with iptables. I don't know can pf store 500 IPs in one list. >> Ipset is written for that purpose. >> >> I can't find information is there linux or BSD distribution with effective >> firewall that uses optimized algorithm to store hundreds of IPs and to >> forward huge traffic. Any idea? >> > > I've been using Linux (CentOS5) on gigabit firewalls, for thousands of > users. No problems. Yeah, but what is your ruleset? > Just make sure ip_conntrack_max is big enough, so you don't run out of > connections. Just three months ago I saw a CentOS L2TP cluster explode because of this -- and the machines have _plenty_ of RAM each. Turned off ip[6]tables entirely and let the Ciscos do this was the only solution. > There are other things to tune to optimize the performance, but it's > certainly doable with linux+iptables. Nail, hammer, etc. ;) > -- Pasi Timo