General Questions

I  am running a M0n0wall 1.3b18 with a WAN, LAN and an Internal Segment, there is nothing magical about the rules or setup, just minimum rules set to host a SMTP, HTTP, IMAP and DNS Server.

There is 2 NATs 1:1 that are used for DNS and SMTP. other than that, nothing much, just the basic.

The hardware is a Soekris 5501-70 with FC and an Encryption card (Hifn 7955) to help VPN performance from this office (remote) to the headquarters.
The WAN capacity is a 20 Mbps (FiOS) pipe and I constant downloading large ISO from the headquarters or from the internet that maxes that up..

The device keeps locking up after 12 Minutes or of data transfer from the WAN @ 19Mbps or at 60 Mbps between the LAN and the other internal Segment.

The Soekris 5501(including PS) is about a week old and this is the first couple of days that I am actually using it.
I contact Soekris yesterday and they are pointing to M0n0wall "unstable" beta version.

I spent quite a lot of time searching for M0n0wall +locks-up and I am not able to make any progress as far as troubleshooting or newly posted issues.

Has anyone experienced any issues with Soekris 5501-70 +VPN Encryption Card with M0n0wall 1.3b18?
Any suggestion on how to troubleshoot this issue?
Should I downgrade to a know good release?


Thank You

Since it locks up fairly quick, I would recommend backing up your configuration. Restore monowall defaults and add one feature at a time... force high traffic. Then repeat until you determine if it is an incorrect setting or hardware.

[75% CPU utilization]

On the same issue, I would like to ask what is the expected CPU utilization of hardware (like/or the Soerkris 5501)?
I am experiencing up to 75% CPU utilization with traffic up to 60 Mbps between the LAN and the other internal segment.    That looks very high to me as I know I will transfer data between this 2 segments with higher transfer rate (from server w/gigabit interfaces and SAS disks)

Is that a normal CPU utilization?

Thanks

[Soekris VPN 1411, AKA Hifn 7955]

Okay, after quite  a few tests and configuration here is the results;

The VPN Card (Soekris VPN 1411, AKA Hifn 7955) does not deliver any performance enhancement and is causing the lock-ups.

With that said, I am having a hard time to believe I am the only one having this issue or have found that the card itself provides no improvement on crypto data transfer, and most of all, locks up the appliance.

Has anyone out there got this VPN Card to work properly and also delivery a better performance to the FW at all?

I haven't tested m0n0 lately, but testing an Alix (same chipset) with FreeBSD 6 based pfSense showed significant benefits from using a VPN 1411:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,14581.0.html
I remember CMB doing some tests on m0n0wall with similar results, but I'm too lazy to find it.
I don't have the time to test this at the moment, but your results seem suspect.
Was this conclusion made by observing a live system, or running tests in a controlled environment using a near-stock config? If you have another system (Soekris + hifn) you might want to test the config on that to rule out hardware.