[NTLUG:Discuss] LAN/NAT Capacity

[Aaron Goldblatt]

I'm running into a new issue with my new LAN setup.

I went the 802.11b route, and the AP I wound up with will connect 
directly with my 100mb-only hub, so I don't have to do any screwy 
firewall dancing; everything I use is behind it, which makes life 
easy.

Now that I've got everything masq'd and it's working, I'm hitting a 
capacity wall that, I don't think, is due to the DSL line I'm still using.

I was downloading CD images last night with jigdo (debian, jigdo is 
awesome), and when it hit 40k/sec, all my other activity not only 
slowed down, but started to fail.  DNS lookups for normally 
accessable sites like slashdot and ebay failed; when they didn't fail, 
the http connections did.

This is new behavior.  Prior to implementing (my very very crude 
two line) masq, the line tended to slow and saturate at about the 
same 40k/sec, but I didn't get failed transfers, just painfully slow 
ones.

By the way, this isn't related to the 802.11b portion of my network. I 
haven't started using that much yet; this is all happening on the 
wireline.

Is this some funky capacity issue with my box (AMD K6-2/250, 192 
megs RAM), or something up with the kernel (2.4.19, custom 
compile)?

ag