Kevin wrote:
A friend needs to order a basic computer with a good warranty,
to run as a very basic OpenBSD 3.7 firewall for a cablemodem.
I'd put one together from parts, but I don't relish doing "won't boot"
hardware support from 1600 miles away.
Looking at the Dell Dimension line (probably the 2400 or 3000)
one concern is that I don't see *any* reports, success or failure,
running OpenBSD on this particular product?
One reason to choose the Dell (with a CPU that is way overkill) is
that the box may be eventually repurposed as an XP desktop...
Alternately, any other suggestions for a US mail order PC
vendor with fair prices, quick turnaround, a hardware warranty
and a pre-built small tower which will reliably run OpenBSD?
This is just going to get shoved under a desk, so rackmount
is not a consideration, and it doesn't need to be perfectly quiet.
Thanks,
Kevin
I used one of the Dell Optiplex line about 2 years ago to build a
firewall at a chemical plant. I specifically asked my boss to get me
the bloody cheapest thing he could that had a PCI slot, and that's what
I ended up with. As long as you stick to the hardware compatibility
list, you shouldn't have any trouble. I will note that when I built
that firewall, the embedded NIC was an xl, which of course threw out all
sorts of "Command not completed" errors. Whether or not that is still a
problem on current kernels (this was built in the 3.3 days), I couldn't
tell you, as my current home firewall has an rl and an fxp in it.
