Re: SD MythTV, more CPU needed on FW?

Bob McConnell wrote:
> JP Vossen wrote:
>> I recently moved my wireless access point to a dedicated interface on 
>> my M0n0wall generic-pc 1.231 running on an 10 year old OptiPlex Gs+ 
>> P166. (Wow, I'd forgotten how *old* that box was!  M0n0wall works 
>> great, though the GUI is a tad sluggish.)
>>
>> When the WRT54GL wireless AP was directly on the LAN, standard def 
>> MPEG2 played over MythTV perfectly.  Now that I've firewalled it 
>> (separate segment, non-bridged) and opened up TCP/3306 and 
>> TCP/6543-6544 (tried with and w/o 'frag'), playback is too choppy to 
>> watch.  It will play for ~2 seconds, pause for ~2 seconds, etc.
>>
>> I'm only using 21% of memory and CPU load is in the 0-5% range even 
>> when attempting to watch MythTV.  No VPNs, pretty small environment.  
>> FYI the LAN and W_LAN ports are on the same IntelDual (fxp driver) 
>> card (though I know the packets still have to leave the card to go 
>> through packet filtering).  The LAN itself is a D-Link DLI-DGS-1224T 
>> "smart" 10/100/1000 switch, and as noted when everything was local to 
>> that it worked fine (since the limit there was wireless speed).
>>
>> While I admit the FW hardware is ancient (P166!), according to 
>> M0n0wall I'm still barely using it.  Does anyone think throwing 
>> hardware at the firewall will fix this problem?  If so, why, since CPU 
>> and RAM use are so low.  What am I missing?
>>
>> Would the latest M0n0wall beta firmware help?
> 
> The switch is more likely to be the bottleneck. Even if the NIC is 
> capable of full-duplex, there is no guarantee that it works well with 
> that switch.

I'm confused.  MythTV over wireless worked fine when everything was on 
the same (LAN) switch.  Heck, it all worked fine when everything was on 
the same old 10/100 *hub* that I was using until it died last month.  It 
was only when I added the M0n0 into the mix that it stopped working.


 > The first thing I would try is add a second NIC and split
 > the LAN and WAN subnets. You can probably get away with just a
 > turnaround cable on the WAN side if you don't have another hub or
 > switch.

Still confused.  The M0n0 has about 7 NICs, and as previously noted the 
Wireless is on a dedicated NIC/segment.  Maybe the confusion here is 
that I said it's on the same card, but wasn't clear that the card is a 
*dual* port NIC (IntelDual).  Both LAN (fxp2) and W_LAN (fxp3) indicate 
"100baseTX <full-duplex>" in http://m0no/status_interfaces.php.

WORKED:
(LAN switch) <--> WRT54GL (OpenWRT Kamikaze r16206)
       |               |
  [MythTV Backend] [MythTV Client]


Too choppy/jerky to watch:
(LAN switch) <--> [M0n0wall] <--> WRT54GL (OpenWRT Kamikaze r16206)
       |                              |
  [MythTV Backend]               [MythTV Client]


Thanks for thinking about it,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
My Account, My Opinions     |=========|      http://www.jpsdomain.org/
----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.