Over the last few weeks I’ve been upgrading ROMWNET. My bandwidth requirements have been increasing pretty quick, last December my website served up 2.5GBs of data, last month it served up 3GBs. Already this month it has served up 4GBs and climbing.
Most of the traffic is coming from the various search engines and web crawlers out there. I am actually surprised at how many different search engines there are.
It was pretty apparent by the middle of last month that my network equipment was no longer capable of handling the load I needed it to handle anymore. Using my phone during certain times of the day was useless, I use Vonageand since my primary firewall/router was a Netgear FWAG114 which didn’t support QOS packets queues, my phone would cut in and out if the search engines started to download a few pictures at the same time.
As good as the FWAG114 was, it would still crash if you were using BitTorrent and was downloading something with 2000 or 2500 seeders.
In this major overhaul I also wanted to reclaim my notebook which was my acting VM server since my media center machine had been out of commission since the move.
So after a couple of weekends of work and some new equipment I now have something better than I had before, with most of my requirements fulfilled.
I purchased three M300-LCD systems, used two of them as VM servers, and one as a pfSense 1.0.1 embedded firewall device.
Setting up pfSense turned out to be a non-trivial exercise with the M300-LCD since the gigabit Ethernet adapters have a newer PCI identifier then the version of FreeBSD that pfSense relies on knows how to deal with. I’ll write another post about that experience.
—– Rom