FreeBSD + Rainbow Cryptoswift

[Mike Tancsa]

At 10:34 AM 26/01/2004, Rumen Telbizov wrote:
>Thank for the reply Mike.
>
>I took a look at those cards (vpn1201 and vpn1211).
>They don't seem to have AES support and only support
>2-8 RSA connections/sec.

Check the man pages to see what is actually supported. The chip might do XX 
but the drivers might not do what you want.  I repeat, check the man pages :-)


>Rainbow say that their cards
>support 1000 RSA connections/sec which is quite astonishing.

But is there FreeBSD support ?



>Anyway it would be interesting for me if you share your
>opinion about the performance you gained from those (1201 - 1211)
>cards in comparison to the software computations.
>It would be nice if tell me how much did you pay for these
>cards because there are no prices on the site!

The prices are on the site
http://www.soekris.com/how_to_buy.htm



>I read in a mailing list that the Rainbow's card (cryptoswift)
>is 1000 GBP.


The 1201 is $79USD vs $1,800USD for the above card.


>An interesing topic is if this performance could be gained
>with an smp machine (say 2-4 xeons + lots of RAM) instead
>of paying 1000 GBP for a card.

Apart from a number of soekris boxes with the 1211s, I have a number of 
backup servers that take dumps and tar files over ssh.  For me, using 3des 
ssh over offloaded onto the HiFn card keeps the load average quite low on 
the target server so I dont have to worry about scheduling issues.

         ---Mike