Is this a good basic rig?

[HBeagley]

Hi there,

I have recently built a untangle server, it runs okay, but it's start up time is horrid, it is very slow to get to a state where my clients can get online.

the specs of the system are:

AMD Duron 1.2GHz CPU
1GB of DDR 400 RAM
20GB IDE HD
Nvidia geforce 2 GPU
2x NICs

The number of clients I will be using with this box is about 10, as in my home there is nearly a PC in each.

I am running the lite package as well.

If you guys have any suggestions please let me know, as I want to keep my home network secure and safe as I have some majorly untech savay users to deal with.

Thanks Again

Haydon (HBeagley)

[memothejanitor]

Well I can tell you that it's pretty normal with the hardware you are using, you don't have a large network so after the system is up and running hopefully you won't have slow-downs. You might want to install only the most vital modules, so you can have a little better performance.

And your harddrive is too small!

Check this out http://wiki.untangle.com/index.php/H...e_Requirements

[dmorris]

Yeah it should be fine.
That thing was a BEAST back in 2001.

Just be wary - hard drives that old can go bad. If it works I wouldn't mess with it though.

[k6rtm]

The common refrain around here is to use good NICs -- you don't say what you are using. If you are using software (realtek) NICs, things are going to start at slow and progress rapidly to ugly. Watch CPU use during peak traffic periods -- you might be better off going with solid hardware NICs if you are currently using software ones.

--bob in rainy silicon valley

[dmorris]

The common refrain around here is to use good NICs -- you don't say what you are using. If you are using software (realtek) NICs, things are going to start at slow and progress rapidly to ugly. Watch CPU use during peak traffic periods -- you might be better off going with solid hardware NICs if you are currently using software ones.

--bob in rainy silicon valley

Please not this again.

[johnsonx42]

That's an ok rig for home use. The one I'm using now in my (tiny) office is no better and may be worse. It's a 1.5Ghz VIA C7, which by most measurements is the slowest remotely modern CPU on the planet by a wide margin (at the very best it's equal to your 1.2ghz Duron). I've only got 512MB of RAM, and two realtek (gasp!) integrated NICs.

Yeah, it takes awhile to boot, but I've never had to re-boot it since putting it online, and using the graphical console is rather slow. Administering it via the Web interface is fine, and using it is just fine. It routes packets plenty fast - my VOIP phones work perfectly, way better than they did connected via a cheap Netgear router. I'm only using a few modules: Spam, Spyware, Adblock, OpenVPN. The cpu load is always very low.

[sky-knight]

It all depends on how fast your Internet connection is. The realteks have issues with higher speed lines.

My first Untangle was a PIII 900mhz, 512mb ram, 40gb hard disk and two realtek 8139d cards.

It worked ok, then I put my desktop behind it and tried to download an ISO from somewhere... download halted, internal stopped responding. I knew the hardware was fine because I had just put Untangle on a box I had been using with PFSense for quite awhile.

I remembered my BSD hardware experience, yanked the Realtek, installed Intel and the box was happy again. 512mb of ram is very light, and to keep that unit running required constant tinkering with bypass rules. Game performance was terrible no matter what I did. But you have 1gb which is more than enough for even a 50 user network if you configure the box correctly.

The unit you have with good interfaces will do just about anything you could ever want for a home network. Use cheap realteks and you'll be ok on slower DSL. But if you attempt to use that on a fast DOCSIS 2.0 or DOCSIS 3.0 line it just won't be able to keep up. Expect that unit to top out somewhere between 8 and 10mb of throughput.

Of course the downside is the expense you're going to pay in power, and heat generation while that box is in operation.

[proactivens]

Please not this again.

Believe it or not, there is a lot of truth to the software interface thing. I think we're just going to have to setup a lab to prove it once and for all.

[sky-knight]

Truth or not, part of the issue is that I haven't completely explained what happens. Or at least the results I've seen in my own lab.

I didn't gain the information I spew around here at random, it's what I got after years of experimentation with different linux / bsd based routing distributions.

For some odd reason however, Untangle shows this issue more so than anything else. Of course I had long converted to Untangle before I switched to an Internet connection fast enough for it to matter. So that could simply be all there is. Add to that the fact that Untangle itself has been reducing its own requirements every version release and things get even more difficult to predict.

Anyway, a rule of thumb that I use.

Single Core, soft interface = 5-10mbit throughput
Single Core, hard interface = 20-50mbit (this is a very wide range based largely on how fast your CPU is.)
Dual Core, soft interface = 20mbit (realtek gigabit cards just seem to stop at the 20mbit... I don't know why they just do)
Dual Core, hard interface = 800mbit (I'm not joking here, I've had a box on my lan I was using a web server stress tester against my local web server. It was shoving data through the rack as fast as the line would carry it. I likely could have gotten more if I wasn't using a cheap netgear gigabit switch)

It's just one of those things, interfaces are so cheap. Why mess with it? The only advantage of allowing the use of realtek and similar interfaces is access to cheaper hardware. Untangle isn't a desktop, it's a server. When the value of the software being installed is called into question, the value of the hardware the software is going on needs to match.

The question really is, what is the value of your installation? If you run on junk, you get junk. When you run on good stuff, you get good stuff. This isn't a hard discussion. For similar reasons I don't see a point in deploying Untangle with less than 1gb of ram.

The really short answer? Any current desktop grade hardware is capable of powering a rather large network. When I say rather large I mean measured in the hundreds. There is no way to get new hardware that can "only" support 10 users and save any real money. Unless you want to re-purpose old tech and deal with the issues that brings.

Finally, iperf testing is useless. Anything performs at wirespeed when only the linux kernel is involved. That's why I switched to a web server stress test, all that TCP 80 traffic from random IP addresses fired up the rack and lit Untangle up like a Christmas tree.

So go Untangle, go forth and build your own lab. I look forward to your findings.

P.S. I guess we should try to change the vocabulary. Because mrunkel is correct, there is no such thing as a software interface vs a hardware one. So What is the difference? What part of the process does Intel put in hardware, or do better at in software, vs their realtek cousins that causes the performance gap? A more correct way of stating my experience would be to say that Intel / 3COM based interfaces have always worked better than Realtek, VIA, and Marvell based interfaces.

[GeneralEclectic]

Since startup time is the problem, I'd point directly at that HDD. It's a dinosaur. A 20GB IDE drive of that vintage is going to be slow as molasses on Neptune. That's where to go first. Do you have something better hanging around? If not, new IDE drives are scarce but it looks like the Egg still has some that would be a huge improvement, such as:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136112

I suggest this one over the 80GB model ($3 less after shipping) because this is a single-platter drive. The 80GB has one head, the 160GB has two, so the net read-write performance is going to be better due to fewer/shorter seeks and more written to the outermost tracks.

Get yourself a copy of Clonezilla to transfer the system to the new drive.