NAT and traffic shaping

[Richard J Kuhns]

We have a customer (an apartment complex) who wants us to deploy a 
FreeBSD box that will handle NAT for 400 to 600 machines (so figure 
multiple connections per machine) and that can handle a steady 12 to 15 
Mb of ethernet traffic, both directions. I'm sure we'll also want to do 
some traffic shaping. Would anyone care to offer 
suggestions/recommendations/horror stories about implementing this? 
Specifically, how hefty a box should we use (RAM/CPU), and which version 
of FreeBSD? We're mostly running 4.9-stable right now and it's been very 
reliable. I've installed 5.2.1 on a couple of boxes with no major 
problems, but they also haven't been heavily loaded.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
	- Rich
-- 
Richard Kuhns                   Wintek Corporation
E-mail: rjk at wintek.com          427 N 6th Street
Tel: +1 (765) 742-8428          Lafayette, IN 47901-1126
Fax: +1 (765) 742-0646          United States of America