firewall box: PCI vs. ISA NICs

nlightn · Apprentice Joined: 16 Sep 2003 Posts: 171

I have an old HP Pavilion desktop that I want to turn into a firewall for my home LAN. It has a 166 MHz Pentium MMX CPU, 128 MB PC100 RAM (I had an extra stick lying around), but it only has one PCI slot, which currently has a D-Link 10/100mbps NIC installed. I need two NICs for a firewall, correct? So what should I do? Find another old box for a firewall, or deal with a 10mbps ISA NIC? Thoughts?

edit: oh yes, forgot to mention that besides the PCI slot it has 2 available ISA slots.

jsleeper · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 9:44 pm Post subject:

If you are hooking up to cable/dsl, I don't see a problem w/putting in a 10mbps ISA card... Make that card the external so the firewall can talk to the LAN at 100 (shouldn't make a difference though.

joe
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Pasketti · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 9:45 pm Post subject:

Those sound like your only options (replace box or use ISA card).

But consider that whatever net connection you have is not likely to be faster than 10Mbit, so the ISA card should be fine on the uplink part...

zaftro · Posted: Sat Oct 04, 2003 8:25 am Post subject:

The problem with ISA is that its a really slow bus, 12Mbit/s or something. Moreover only one ISA device can talk at one AFAIK. If your net connection is faster than say 400kbit/s (50kB/s) try and use PCI.

I previously used a linux gateway with 2 ISA cards and the fastest throughput was 800kbit/s (ie 100kB/s downloads), which BLEW. Got a couple of PCI cards and throughput hasn't been a problem, now it can handle atleast 5Mbit/s and that restriction is due to my ISP.

BOOO ISA.... YAY PCI!!!!

Has the PC got usb? If so a usb ethernet inteface could work...

EDIT: Actually if you only use an ISA card on the uplink, as whats his face said, that should be cool

Till next time,

zaftro
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