Hardware

What would be a reasonible guess on what throughput i will get on this routerboard (aw-a695) i have laying around:

VIA 400Mhz CPU
256MB SDRAM PC100
4x Intel NIC 100Mbit


Is it worth trying to install m0n0wall on this, as i got 100/100mbit internet, or should i just go with one of those 120€+ NETGEAR/Linksys/etc SOHO routers...

 
/ Anton

If you've got it lying around, try it and see.  Let us know what you find.

If you've got it lying around, try it and see.  Let us know what you find.

After some tweaking in bios with CHS, harddrive block mode and a lot of trial and error, i manage monowall to boot from the CF-card.
Put the router between my computer and my freenasbox on two different subnets, and started a transfer with a dvd-image.
Little disappointed due the speed was only ~47mbit troughput.

Guess i have to look for another solution..


If any knows any tweaks i´ll be happy to hear about it.

If you've got it lying around, try it and see.  Let us know what you find.

After some tweaking in bios with CHS, harddrive block mode and a lot of trial and error, i manage monowall to boot from the CF-card.
Put the router between my computer and my freenasbox on two different subnets, and started a transfer with a dvd-image.
Little disappointed due the speed was only ~47mbit troughput.

Guess i have to look for another solution..


If any knows any tweaks i´ll be happy to hear about it.

Well, you didn't say much about what kind of test you did. Was it Samba, NFS, etc? 47 Mb/s sounds like a windows file transfer speed. About the only thing I've seen that can actually max out a 100 Mb/s is a simple application that runs on both ends to exchange UDP data like Blue's Tools and such. I've seen NFS hit around 80+ Mb/s but even given the old system specs, you might be running into protocol overhead that is affecting your speed test. Traffic shaping will affect the test, even if it's set for 100 Mb/s pipe speed, you still burn CPU having it watch all the packets go by.

There are so many factors at play, especially a 4x Intel NIC card which either means it's one card with 4 ports on it, or 4 separate cards? You could always try device polling if throughput is more important at the expense of a slightly higher forwarding delay.

Well, you didn't say much about what kind of test you did. Was it Samba, NFS, etc? 47 Mb/s sounds like a windows file transfer speed. About the only thing I've seen that can actually max out a 100 Mb/s is a simple application that runs on both ends to exchange UDP data like Blue's Tools and such. I've seen NFS hit around 80+ Mb/s but even given the old system specs, you might be running into protocol overhead that is affecting your speed test. Traffic shaping will affect the test, even if it's set for 100 Mb/s pipe speed, you still burn CPU having it watch all the packets go by.

There are so many factors at play, especially a 4x Intel NIC card which either means it's one card with 4 ports on it, or 4 separate cards? You could always try device polling if throughput is more important at the expense of a slightly higher forwarding delay.

Hi, thanks for your post.
You were absolutly right, it was samba. Didnt know it could differ so much in throughput samba vs ftp.
Tried now with ftp and got ~84mbit/sec, so that im pretty happy with.

The 4 nics is integrated on the board with its own irq-adress for each NIC.

Very glad, now i got a nice little router.   

Hi, thanks for your post.
You were absolutly right, it was samba. Didnt know it could differ so much in throughput samba vs ftp.
Tried now with ftp and got ~84mbit/sec, so that im pretty happy with.

The 4 nics is integrated on the board with its own irq-adress for each NIC.

Very glad, now i got a nice little router.   

Yeah, it's amazing how much Microsoft has bastardize the Samba file transfer. Glad to hear you could get a more real world test with it and that the results are what you were looking for.