M0n0wall

[comphollic]

ok, i've been reading some threads where people started using their old P1 and P2 computers and turning them to hadware based firewalls, so i decided to try it myself, just to experiment..
i have a pentium 1 233mhz with 128mb sdram and installed m0n0wall on it..
ok... this is my setup
remember i just wanted to experiment
internet-->modem-->m0n0wall-->router-->computer
after 2 hours strugling why i couldnt get internet access i somehow manage to fix that problem...ok so internet works .... went to a speed test site (specifically nyc.speakeasy.net) since i live in new jersey and have OOL 10/1mb connection..
before this experiment, i always got around 9mb down and 900kb up in speed test..
after i put m0n0wall..if im lucky ill pull 1mb down in speed test, upload is fine i get 900kb almost all the time..but download fluctuates from 300kb to 1/2mb to 1mb...
im using two 3com 100mb NICs...one for wan and the other for lan... according to the webadmin m0n0wall page, they are both connected at 100 base-TX full duplex..
anyone who ever used m0n0wall had this same trouble?
i would appreciate all the help..
thank-you

 

[Cheetah8799]

could be the nic in the computer you are using. It's probably a 10mbps card or maybe 100, which is definately fast enough, but it could be going bad. I know i had a machine at work that I was using for some testing and was totally confused as to why I could only download for about 400kbps... was blaming everything but the nic, then realized what it was after a lot of hassle...

anyway, it's worth a shot if you have a spare you can stick in it.

 

[OmegaXero]

I can't remember of m0n0wall has an option to turn off snort/instrusion detection, if it does turn it off and rerun your tests. Snort eats a lot of CPU power on older systems. Do you have a switch that you can use for your local LAN instead of your router?

 

[gaidin123]

Are you using the 1.1 release of monowall, or the 1.2 betas? The mailing list was talking about some bugs that could affect either connections or overall speed with the betas since they switched from FreeBSD 4.x to 5.x in the move from 1.1 to 1.2b...so there were a lot of changes that they're still working out.

While you do the speedtest, go to the monowall admin page and watch your cpu usage if you're using the 1.2b...

Gaidin

 

[n0cmonkey]

Remove the router from the configuration, it's only going to complicate things. And don't they have a 10mbit internet facing jack anyways?

 

[comphollic]

first off thank-you for responding...
ok.. first thing i did after reading all the responses was to test my network card on another machine, and indeed, it was one of the nics that was going bad (managed to get 300kbps in speed tests) .. so i guess that was the problem..
ill see if i can get another nic and replace the defected one and continue experimenting..
btw does ICOP or any other floppy\cd boot linux firewalls support traffic manager or some type of bandwidth controller..its a feature im mostly interested in...

 

[gaidin123]

Devil Linux is a CD based linux distro that's been around for a long time but I never see anyone mention it. I'm pretty sure it has all the qos stuff you want but I do not think that it has a super friendly GUI like monowall does. It may have a console configuration menu system though. It's mainly a stripped down linux distro meant to run of CD, or USB key, or hard drive if you wish.

I'm sure some of the others have qos support built in. The sveasoft Linksys WRT54G firmware also has the same linux qos if you happen to have one of those.

Gaidin

 

[comphollic]

ok..i tried coyote, worked fine and real easy to set up, but i couldnt figure out how to set up the qos.. what surprised me the most is that with coyote, my download speed was back to normal, getting 9000kbs down and 900kbs up in speed tests...
lol, so i decided to give monowall one more chance, booted it up, and BAM, speeds back to normal..wierd, i dont know what happened before witht he terrible speeds, but after giving monowall a second chance it worked perfectly... i setted up the traffic shaper and was set to go...
thank-you all for the help...