Firewalling High Speed Interfaces (ATM -> GigE)

[Richard Fifarek <rfifarek@silug.org>]

	The folks that I work for want to place a firewall between us and
the "outside world" to help minimize our exposure.  We have an ATM OC-3
(155 Mb/s) link currently, and eventually that will be expanded to GigE.  
My question is with a fairly vanilla firewall set (allow Ssh, HTTP/HTTPS, 
SMTP, FTP; disallow everything else), what kind of horse power will this 
require?  What kind of lag can I expect?  At OC-3 speeds, I'm guessing 
that most machines could handle the load, however when it jumps up to 
GigE, I expect problems.  With 2.4 supporting threaded IP stack, SMP makes 
sense 2-4 processors.  Would Xeon's extra cache make a difference?

	     -----------------------------------------------------
	     Richard H. Fifarek	       		rfifarek@silug.org
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