NAT and DSL, what is the fastest?

[mepasha]

i have six machines on my home fast-ethernet LAN. Two PC's and Four Mac's. They all currently share the DSl connection through one of the PC's running "SoftRouter Plus" (which is Vicomsoft's consumer NAT software).

everything run's fine, simultaneous internet access is available through a properly run DHCP set up.
this is my problem:
before setting the shared DSL connection up i was consistently getting around 80KB/sec during FTP downloads. now after sharing the DSL i max out at approx. 50KB/sec; even when only one machine is connected to the internet. i am almost positive this is because of the software based router.

so, do any of you wise folks have any suggestions regarding better versions of software NAT/router applications. they can also be mac applications, for i have an available mac for the gateway machine.
need more speed
mepasha

[klymacks]

you're only as strong as your weakest link.

In this situation, it's your OS and dhcp. Run ipmasq in linux. I have a USR Courier v.90. I was sharing it with 3 other people at one point. I was running it through a winproxy, and it was horrible. I put up a solaris server and ran it as a router/firewall. That did the trick. If you're acctually considering running linux, I can run you through the setup step-by-step.

[sdrop]

klymacks is right. usually, these NAT software already divide the connection even if it's not being used by the workstations.

as he said, you can setup a Linux box to share your DSL connection through IP Masquerading, or better known as NAT (Network Address Translation).

Setting up IP_Masq in Linux is quite easy, but through my experience, setting up Ip_Masq or NAT with FreeBSD/OpenBSD is easier. Linux requires a lot of kernel options (if they're not compiled by default), etc. *BSD requires less. Besides, OpenBSD has better security than Linux. But of course, this is debatable. As they say, it depends on the sysad. But it's a known fact that OpenBSD has the largest crypto support.



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#!/bin/sh

cat /usr/info
socket drop (sdrop)
sdrop@spyring.com