Suggestions for low-power gigE firewall?

[Tom Evans]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Andreas Nilsson <andrnils at gmail.com> wrote:
> Without knowing the exact cabling arrangement, have you considered buying a
> small switch that understands vlan? Then you could do some trickery with
> that to have your server elsewhere (with just one ethernet cable)?

Networking is not really my thing, so I'm going to read up some more
on that - it sounds promising. I've probably got my thinking wrong on
this, but would the result of putting lan and wan traffic down a
single cable limit the upload and download to a cumulative 1 Gbit/s
from a LAN client's viewpoint?

> We haven't done any testing of the different NAT solutions available so I
> can't give any specific numbers there. But I don't think it will help
> throughput, especially old school natd in userspace.
>
> A colleague of mine also has 1Gbit/s home, and he hade to tweak the settings
> and buy a decent intel card to get 900+Mbit/s on his old dell entry level
> desktop.

I would use pf to do the nat; it's what I used with ADSL - perhaps
that is even slower, but fine for 8 Mbit.

I've got plenty of cheap intel (em) cards, they've worked quite well
as clients so far without any tuning on 10. I don't use torrents or
things like that, but do download large files from time to time. The
quickest I've clocked one of them downloaded is 87 MB/s, which I guess
is roughly 700 Mbit/s, but I've no idea of the overheads. Certainly
with iperf between each BSD machine on the LAN I can get a reading of
900+ Mbit/s.

Cheers

Tom