Henning, as always, thanks very much for your responses -- invariably to the point and informative.
Thanks also to the others who have responded. I feel a little guilty dumping all this stuff to the list -- I have done some research on my own but not as much as I should have but circumstances forced my hand. On Monday we are getting some consultants in who have experience with BSD systems (although how much I'm not sure) and to get value out of them I wanted to make sure that *I* understood the issues so I could direct their efforts. This isnt actually my job -- I set up these systems years ago and handed the day to day maintenance to some one else. He had been researching these issue for some time but recently left leaving me the only person with knowledge and expertise to pursue the matter. Our plan of action is to first install 4.2 and see how that goes, then we intend to try NetBSD (or possibly Dragonfly) with the latest version of pf that they support to see what benefit multiple CPUs can give. When we are done I'll post a summary of our finding to the list. And again, thanks everyone. Russell
