How we did it

How we did it

We installed the products on a network consisting of four Compaq iPaq 733-MHz workstations with two running Windows 98 and two running Windows 2000 Professional. A second network contained two Win 2000 Servers running on identical Compaq ProLiant 5500R with dual 550 Xeon processors and 512M bytes of memory. The gateway was used to link the two networks for performance testing.

To measure the relative performance of each gateway device, we initiated a large (2G bytes) file transfer using FTP from one workstation to one of the servers on the second network. Next we opened a browser on another workstation and attempted to load a Web page from the second server. We cleared all history and cache prior to accessing the Web page, and measured the amount of time it took to load the page.

To judge the management and administration, we configured each device for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol with IP addresses below 32 reserved as static. We also looked at the ability to filter ports and specific firewall-related settings. We also looked at the different features that each box offered and how easy those features were to use.

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Ferrill is an electrical engineer and freelance writer in Lancaster, Calif. He has been using and writing about network management software for more than 10 years. He can be reached at paul.ferrill@verizon.net.

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