[ILUG] Linux router

[Martin Feeney]

On Tue, 15 May 2001 12:00:27 Justin Mason wrote:
> 
> James.Chambers at irishlife.ie said:
> 
> > I want to setup a p133 32mb linux router for my home network , but at
> the
> > moment I am playing some online games and was just wondering if any
> has any
> > idea how much it would add to my ping in games?
> > if it makes any odds the network is on a 100 hub/switch with 100
> network
> > cards and if I was playing online games that would be the only
> internet
> > traffic.
> 
> Our dedicated plain-old-P200, with nothing else running on it, shuttles
> packets back and forth in about 500 microseconds. That's usecs, not
> msecs.
> 
> It also does NAT and firewalling, so if you leave those out it'd be
> faster; but I don't think 500us is going to affect gaming when you have
> the ISDN or dialup latency in the picture, anyway.

Doh! pressed send rather than check for new mail.

I find that a Masqing firewall tends to smooth out the traffic for online
gaming. You don't get better ping times, but it "feels" smoother. Probably
because Linux reconstruct the fragmented packets before giving them to
your windows machine so the game doesn't have to worry about packet
fragments. And my internet gateway at home is just a P90/56k modem and it
only has a 10MB NIC.

Maritn.