> I will be setting up a firewall and need to decide what type of > computer to buy. It will be a debian intel pc running as a > packet filtering system (restricting various ports, etc) and will > have 2 100 BaseT interfaces. I plan to use 2.1.XXX kernels and > ipchains. In the future it may get fancier with proxy support and > more interfaces on the inside of the wall. What I need to know > now is how much computer to buy. Should I get 450 MHz PII or is > an older 200 MHz PPro enough? How much memory and disk should be > available for possible future proxy services? The bottleneck will be the PCI interface, not the CPU. A P166 would be plenty. Going much higher than this really isn't going to buy you anything. If your connection to the internet is less than a DS3, a 486 can easilly saturate it. In other words, if all you have is a T1 to the internet, just about any PC will do the job. A 100MB NIC to the internet means nothing if the internet connection is a T1 on the other side of the router. You are never going to receive more than 193K Bytes/second on a T1. If all you are doing is a firewall, Get a cheapo PC that works with Linux. Don't spend more than US$500 on it. Any more computer horsepower will not buy you a thing in throughput.