Going small

[John Murphy]

Hope everyone had a nice easter.

I've decided to stop messing about with noisy old 486s for the gateway/
firewall.  The one I've been configuring runs just fine but it has a
large hot heatsink cooling some power transistor/regulator devices and
I just don't trust it for 24/7 use in a cupboard...

I'm going to get a Soekris Net4801 and fit a 30G HD from a broken laptop
I was given.  Just undecided whether to get it from the USA or Belgium
(I'm in the UK); the 21%VAT against the better exchange rate etc.

(Update: they were out of stock at the manufacturers so I've ordered one
from http://soekris.kd85.com with case and 2.5" hard drive mounting kit.
Got my name on the last one! I could have it before the weekend.)

I don't know much about them at this stage, except they run FreeBSD of
course and they're probably ten times as efficient as the thing I was
going to use.  http://www.soekris.com/

I'll write my findings here if no-one strongly objects.

Some good pages I've found so far:
http://www.xinu.nl/unix/soekris/net4801/
http://phk.freebsd.dk/soekris/
http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_9863_10524,00.html

I'll be going against the recommendation to use a physically separate
device for the firewall on the grounds that I can enable some server
side filtering at the ISP and I can't afford two soekrises just now.
So it will run ipf, ipnat, ipmon, ftpd, ntp, bind (caching only at
first), sendmail and boa (web server).

-- 
John.