RE: Is Linux based Gateway/Firewall feasible

"Mike O" <mikeeo@xxxxxxx> · Thu, 08 Jul 2004 13:21:36 +0000

I'd like to chime in here considering I brought this topic up a few years 
ago. From a standpoint of routing data from one subnet to another with high 
speed serial interfaces etc.. nothing beats a cisco. Cisco routers have 
special ASIC(application specific intergrated circuits) that do nothing but 
routing and other features.

Now from a firewall standpoint, this is were Linux really shines. Cisco PIX 
firewalls are all based on Intel processors (even celeron) and PC 
architecture. So any machine with a 1ghz and gig of memory should out 
perform any PIX firewall. One thing PIX does bring to the table is failover 
but its expensive. I think any properly configured Linux cluster could give 
PIX failover a run for there money. Price a PIX 525 to a redundant Dell or 
HP slimline with Linux and I think you will be surprised.

-Mike

From: Sudheer Divakaran <sudheer@xxxxxxx>
To: netfilter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Is Linux based Gateway/Firewall feasible
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 17:40:33 +0530

Hi,

I've a local LAN consisting of about 150 machines.  I'm using a machine 
with Linux + IPTables  as the gateway machine which inturn connects to two 
different ISPs.  My question is can a Linux based machine match the 
performance of a hardware based routers provided by Cisco,... OR is my 
decision to go for a Linux based solution is a wrong one?.

Is there so much difference between these two solutions?

Can I achieve the same performance using a high end PC and Linux?

I'm asking this because one guy told me that my decision to go for a Linux 
based solution is a wrong one and it can never match the performance of 
hardware based Routers.

Thanks
Sudheer