I'm wondering if I'd see benefits of using gigabit nics in this situation. I'm repurposing an older gateway minitower PC as a firewall by installing Smoothwall 3.0 on it. Specs are 366 PIII, 160MB RAM Intel board. I plan on installing 4 interfaces. I have 2 Intel 100 Pro PCI cards to install. I have 4 interfaces planned:
Green or trusted will be for my internal network with 2 2003 Domain Controllers, workstations, internal DNS.
Red or untrusted, plugs into my cable modem.
Orange or DMZ will be for my Exchange 2003 server, and I will host a public DNS server here for a Primary zone (I'll setup a Secondary zone at
www.everydns.net for redundancy).
Purple will have my wifi access point hooked up for guests.
I need to buy 2 more nics and I'm wondering if I should gigabit for green and orange. I will be transferring large VM applicances between the two. Also Outlook on workstations will be connecting from green to orange to the Exchange server.
Will the PCI bus limit the bandwidth potential of the gigabit nics?
This isn't a "production" network, but something I'm doing in my basement to learn more about networking...studying for MCSE. But I do want it to work well, and I'll probably use this setup for a while.
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