Hardware

What kind of hardware would this need for a 900 home users on one subnet all with public IPs  some of whom try to download a lot with peer to peer, on one half T1 line.
Would it be better than the Packeteer that current runs out of memory and gets slow once a month.

This question is treated to some extent in the m0n0wall handbook (http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/) in section 2.5, although my experience is somewhat at odds with the statements regarding memory: my m0n0wall currently handles about 170 dhcp clients and shows memory usage in the neighbourhood of 85 MB.

Also be aware that m0n0wall is rumoured to max out at 30 000 connections or firewall states, and your usage may exceed that. Your options to work around this limit are to custom compile m0n0 or consider an alternative, such as pfSense.

db

thanks, I was just wondering if it might be cheaper than buying a "$35,000.00" Cisco device I thought that buying an old pc from the university store, dual pIII 1.266 with plenty of pc133 ram and RAID 0 SCSI hard drives and a 6 month warranty, for $100 rather than $35,000 would sound better as a way to improve the network.
or even build a dual core Opteron with 2 PCI-X slots on separate buses (for forward compatibility to 10GbE) with Intel Gigabit nics and 1GB ram for maybe a couple thousand dollars at Newegg, or even one with a warranty from dell for more.

900 users, on one subnet, some who try to download "a lot", with half a T1?  wow, that's a recipe for disaster in so many ways...

With just a half T1 that you can actually use, you can use a 486 m0n0wall box and not max it out. Holding back the flood from 900 users trying to get out half a T1 is another question entirely - I don't think you need any sort of fancy network hardware for that to work properly, you need a miracle!

If your Packeteer actually makes things work under those absolutely nightmarish network circumstances, I would nominate it for sainthood for miracle working, and keep using it. If you have to reboot it once a month, oh well.

Well, I hope the new provider is better next year because they are switching, and I hope at least to have a full t3, if not 2 bonded t3's.

thanks for the input, I guess theres nothing that can be done this year, now on to trying to get the to upgrade their NT4 dhcp server, so it stops running out of hard disk space and crashing.

Why does it not surprise me that the same place trying to jam 900 users on half a T1 is running a NT 4 DHCP server? 

Good luck, sounds like you're cleaning up one hell of a mess.