On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:17:48AM +0100, Timo Schoeler wrote: > 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? > Hundreds of chains, thousands of rules.. > > 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. > The default values are way too low. First step is to increase that value. > > There are other things to tune to optimize the performance, but it's > > certainly doable with linux+iptables. > > Nail, hammer, etc. ;) > -- Pasi