Replacing my SMC Barricade with dedicated server

I currently have a cable modem linked to my LAN through an SMC Barricade
4-port router/firewall. I've had it about 3 years and it's starting to
get kinda laggy and crashes a lot. It's seen a LOT of hard 24/7 use and
it's time to consider a replacement.

I also need more control over ports than it allows, and *especially* load
balancing. When someone on the LAN runs Bit Tornado, even when it's
allegedly "capped" to dialup speeds, it bogs the internet to a crawl
because the upload pipe is saturated. Thus, I need something like Squid
that can throttle or balance the load between PC's.

I would like to build a PC replacement for the SMC.

I'd like to take my extra box and make it a dedicated firewall/NAT
router/game & fileserver. I could point a 10Mb/s card at the cable modem,
then plug the other PC's into the 100Mb/s cards, thus removing the SMC
completely, but I'm not sure the best way to go about it. I've got Win2k
Server as well as several different Linux distros at hand. At one point I
had Win2k Server installed on it but I had to yank the hard drive for
another box. I had set the 5 NIC's up with static IP's (a 10Mb to the
cable modem, 4 100's to the LAN) and they all showed up in the taskbar,
but that's as far as I got when I had to pull the drive.

It would be simpler to just have a 2 NIC firewall box before the router,
but that would not address the load balancing issue. I have a 24-port hub
available too, but it's only 10Mb/s and I'd like to keep the LAN at 100.
So, it seems that a multi-NIC box would be the way to go. Any suggestions
or ideas??

Thanks

Look at getting two nics into an old computer and running CensorNet or
something like it. CensorNet is rather easy to setup/run and it
actually uses squid, but then brings other things like firewall, DHCP,
DNS etc, into one box. It is a Linux distro.


Bipolar Boogieman Jan 8, 8:36 pm show options
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.networking
From: Bipolar Boogieman <boogie...@nospam.yahoo.com> - Find messages by
this author
Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 04:36:44 GMT
Local: Sat, Jan 8 2005 8:36 pm
Subject: Replacing my SMC Barricade with dedicated server
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I currently have a cable modem linked to my LAN through an SMC
Barricade
4-port router/firewall. I've had it about 3 years and it's starting to
get kinda laggy and crashes a lot. It's seen a LOT of hard 24/7 use and
it's time to consider a replacement.

I also need more control over ports than it allows, and *especially*
load
balancing. When someone on the LAN runs Bit Tornado, even when it's
allegedly "capped" to dialup speeds, it bogs the internet to a crawl
because the upload pipe is saturated. Thus, I need something like Squid
that can throttle or balance the load between PC's.

I would like to build a PC replacement for the SMC.

I'd like to take my extra box and make it a dedicated firewall/NAT
router/game & fileserver. I could point a 10Mb/s card at the cable
modem,
then plug the other PC's into the 100Mb/s cards, thus removing the SMC
completely, but I'm not sure the best way to go about it. I've got
Win2k
Server as well as several different Linux distros at hand. At one point
I
had Win2k Server installed on it but I had to yank the hard drive for
another box. I had set the 5 NIC's up with static IP's (a 10Mb to the
cable modem, 4 100's to the LAN) and they all showed up in the taskbar,
but that's as far as I got when I had to pull the drive.

It would be simpler to just have a 2 NIC firewall box before the
router,
but that would not address the load balancing issue. I have a 24-port
hub
available too, but it's only 10Mb/s and I'd like to keep the LAN at
100.
So, it seems that a multi-NIC box would be the way to go. Any
suggestions
or ideas??

Thanks

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 15:17:46 -0800, KW wrote:

> Look at getting two nics into an old computer and running CensorNet or
> something like it. CensorNet is rather easy to setup/run and it
> actually uses squid, but then brings other things like firewall, DHCP,
> DNS etc, into one box. It is a Linux distro.

That was my first thought. However, see the new "Please! I *really*
need advice on LAN router" thread for additional reasons this isn't the
best solution for my needs.