Network related question about DSL speed going through different hardware and different settings.?

To start off with I have a 2 year degree in Network Systems Administration, A+, Network +, CCNA, 10 years of experience in computer hardware, upgrade/maintenance and building as well as about 5 years of experience with LAN hardware/software. I have a network at home big enough to run a small company. I need an opinion from an outsider as the way i look at it would be one sided. I do not have a lot of sensitive information on my network but i plan to have semi-private sometime soon. Currently i live in a small town a few miles out so I am limited to DSL @ 512Kbps, I logged into my DSL modem and checked the downstream and I am actually hitting the barrier to the next level by having a consistant Downstream of 1498Kbps. That modem is setup in bridged mode with RFC 1492, connected to my Netgear Prosafe VPN Firewall. The firewall is an FVS318 and i have a patch panel with about 4 connections going to that. Lightening took out 4 of the ports a good while back so i had to pick and choose to

Network related question about DSL speed going through different hardware and different settings.?
The pix firewall is much more powerful than the dsl router and should not slow you down at all when using it to login to your dsl connection. it is best you keep it using the bridge mode as this allows you to have full control of all settings from the pix, using the default method would put your pix behind a nat and force double nat envoirment, you would have to open needed ports on both units and could cause more headache for yourself.





This is how i would recomend:





dsl modem to pix firewall to the lan side of the linksys. make sure the router part of the linksys is disabled. also if the pix is your dns/dhcp then disable that on the linksys as well.





for the speed issues, unless your downloading large items at the time of detected slowdowns, there shouldnt be a slowdown. since your setting up a lab and have some linux experience, you might want to look at a software monitoring called MRTG it works well to show you traffic on both the pix and the linksys if the linksys is modified with an aftermarket firmware, like DD-wrt or the like.





you have two options, the simpler route is to use the linksys as its own router and create a second nat to seperate the wireless network.





a nicer option would be to set a different subnet on different interfaces on the pix. (eg. ethernet0,ethernet1) this would help manage your whole network from one point and allow upgrade of wireless in the future without needed much configuration in the future

dds