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x86 Commodity-Hardware Router?
neomage86 asks: "I recently had to set up a router for a small company, only five users at any given time, and the needed VPN capabilities are built in. So, instead of using a Cisco or other embedded router, I decided to just install Linux and IPTables on an old 200 MHz PII I had lying around. It's been working fine, and I'm thinking about doing something like this for a much larger network (3000+ users). Does anyone have suggestions on how much I will have to beef up the hardware to provide IP Masquerading for about 1000 users on a T3; provide network-layer filtering of the transmission; and route between 4-5 internal subnets?"
Microsoft might be a place to start. It's entirely possible they have recommended specs for a win2k router (why anyone would do this, well extra computers and win2k are available, I don't know) against some set of expected clients.
I would probably take your available capacity for the same system running linux at something like 1.5,1.2 times what microsoft recommends if I wanted to be really conservative.
But considering the number of clients you're serving, would it really be so bad to overbuild it? What's a P4 with a gig of ram go for anyway?
:-) Here Here!!