General Questions

A good friend of mine has been trying to get the network in his house of 27-30 guys (depending on the year) working properly for some time now. He has hired a couple of different people, each who has tired something different to create a decent network that can handle the load of 27 college guys daily internet needs. The house I believe has like a 10MB line from cox with their standard little motorola modem.

The first set up tried was one old linksys wifi router and two other wifi routers attached to act as access points. Now with this set up I believe the network was often resetting due to heavy torrent traffic among other things.

Then a networking consultant was brought in and he basically had the house buy a better linksys router and access points. Well that kind of worked but the network continued to have issues staying up at times.

Now the most recent guy has added in another modem to the mix and ran both lines from the two modems into this router http://tinyurl.com/2nl9jk , one in the regular internet port and one in a dmz internet port and a third line running out to previous wifi setup. This set up as well has had problems being able to handle the load (granted not entirely sure what he was tried to do there).

http://tinyurl.com/yoa7yb
These are the routers they are using for wifi access points and such.

My question is will the equipment we have already be able to handle the load its trying to take on in any way? I have an old p4 with 256k ram, 60 gig hd, cdrom, will this be suitable?

Monowall should do fine in this setting and your hardware is ample. Note though, that monowall doesn't do load balancing, which is presumably what the one person was trying to achieve with 2 modems. Load balancing has its issues anyway, just avoid it and purchase whatever bandwidth you need on a single connection and get your monowall running. You'll be pleased with the result.

db

From experience, Linksys products are known to lockup under heavy load.  Great for home use but is definitely under heavy load in your setup.

I'm not sure if it would work without a custom kernel with a higher state table. It's worth a shot, but if connectivity starts randomly working or new connections not working at all while existing connections continue to function, you've exhausted the state table. With almost 30 people who are heavy P2P users, that situation seems likely, but may not be the case.

In that case you have two options - build a custom kernel with a larger state table and make your own image, or use pfSense which lets you increase the state table size in the GUI since pf doesn't require the state table size at kernel compile time.