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I have a number of servers that I rent out to people and have started growing to a point where I need better management. Specifically I am interested in being able to police bandwidth and block port 25 outgoing totally. All I have right now in my infrastructure is a Catalyst 3500XL. I don't want to break the bank and would love any suggestions on some decent cheap hardware solutions for allowing me to:

  1. Block Port 25
  2. Set a Specific Bandwidth Right 1MB but allow people to use more if available
  3. Set an overall bandwidth CAP
  4. Have SNMP so I can monitor via Cactai what is going on in the network
voretaq7
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Al Katawazi
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1 Answers1

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You need a firewall with traffic shaping capabilities to do what you're asking -- the Catalyst 3500 switches, while quite capable, aren't up to this kind of task.

You can consider building your own firewall using a server and something like pfSense (which is more than adequate for small environments and very budget-friendly), or investing in commercial solutions from Cisco or Juniper Networks.

voretaq7
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  • To expand upon my answer a bit - you also probably want to consider breaking your environment into vlans if you haven't already (this will let you monitor traffic per-customer relatively easily & apply other network-level restrictions) – voretaq7 Jan 21 '11 at 18:09
  • Any hardware firewall that I can buy say under $500 that you think will do the job? – Al Katawazi Jan 21 '11 at 19:04
  • You can certainly buy or build a server with at least 2 NICs for under $500, and pfSense is free... – voretaq7 Jan 21 '11 at 19:40