[PLUG] Firewall/router performance

[Jim Garrison]

On 3/21/2015 4:18 PM, Tyrell Jentink wrote:
> I have Comcast, when connected directly to their modem, I get 50Mbps down,
> 5Mbps up. I also get that speed through a gigabit switch and my Netgear AP,
> seemingly ruling out any problems in my end-to-end connection.
> 
> I have been trying to use an old HP Mini 100 as my firewall/router; Atom
> processor, 1GB of RAM, Fedora 21, providing NAT/Firewalld/DHCP/DNS. It has
> a built-in Ethernet card that I'm using on the external network, and a USB
> to Ethernet adapter on the internal network. Both cards are rated 100mbps,
> and ethtool shows them as using that speed.
> 
> However, FROM the HP, speedtest only comes in at 27Mbps... And with that
> computer in the chain (Comcast > HP Mini > Gigabit switch > Netgear AP), I
> only get 5Mbps down, 3 up. Removing the gigabit switch and Netgear gives
> the same results, seemingly indicating the problem is with the HP.
> 
> But WHY? I didn't expect full speed out of the USB device... But if ethtool
> is telling the truth, I'd expect it to have little problem passing 50Mbps
> of traffic. Even if I was just getting the 27Mbps, I would be less inclined
> to complain...
> 
> So is the problem something I can fix, or am I running into USB bus (or
> some other hardware) issues? I have piles of computers... I could easily
> switch to a P4 with 2 gigabit cards... That just seems like so much
> overkill.
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> 
> 

What flavor of USB does it have? If it's USB 1.1 then the speed limit
is 12 megaBITS/second. For USB 2 it's 480 megabits per second.

-- 
Jim Garrison (jhg at acm.org)
PGP Keys at http://www.jhmg.net RSA 0x04B73B7F DH 0x70738D88