General Questions

we have installed a monowall 1.231 with WAN, LAN and OPT1 (DMZ).
somtimes the traffic goes down to 50kbps, sometimes a reset of nat table and firewall state table helps. most of the times the only way to get normal speed (>3000kbps) is to add a rule, apply, remove the rule, apply again and reset the states. reboot of the complete system doens't work.

the traffic is slow between all interfaces. most of the time i want to copy huge files from DMZ=>LAN for backup purposes, there i see when it's slow.

any ideas to fix this problem?

mfg
sebastianus

What kind of hardware are you running your m0n0wall on?

check the obvious first:

are you using ethernet, fiber?  check the lines, older fiber cracks sometimes.   Ethernet can also crap out on you, especially if your cables are near.....something like a blender, or any other unshielded appliance.

are you using 100Mbps ports or 1000Mbps ports?  depending on your network needs, you might have to upgrade to gigabit.

most importantly, what kind of motherboard are you running on?  Is this an old pentium 1 that you converted or...what are the system specs?

basicially, if you want to route 10Mbps of traffic, a fast pentium 1 should be able to keep up for the most part, assuming you have high quality NICs (check the monowall hardware reference guide)  if you want something with a little more kick, say 500Mbps sustained, you're probably looking at a Pentium 3 probably around 600MHz to be safe but you might want to go as high as the harder to find 1GHz, at which point you might as well go get a cheaper pentium 4.

don't forget your NICs, too.  FreeBSD children, such as monowall, tend to get along very well with Intel NICs, which are now all I use.  Your problem could be as simple as using some cheap NIC.   Never forget, just because it says it goes a certain speed...that's almost a promise it will never actually go that speed.


Good Luck.