On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 2:47 PM, Chris McGee <cmcge...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am hunting for a low-power firewall for my home network. For at least > 10 years, whenever my firewall hardware has started to die, I've grabbed a > decommissioned game PC, added a few NIC's, and put OpenBSD on it. The > firewall's current incarnation pulls about 160 watts 24/7; I'd like to > lower that by a lot. > > Requirements are: > 1) Low power (<50w; I want it to pay for itself before the hardware dies) > 2) 4 network interfaces (3 gigabit, one gigabit or 100mbps) > 3) Cheaper is better (e.g., a $200 4-port PCIE NIC on a $75 motherboard > is suboptimal) > 4) Works with OpenBSD 5.2 > 5) Won't cause a hardware bottleneck when pushing 200mbps of > multidirectional traffic through a moderately complex pf ruleset (this > doesn't take a lot of CPU; a 1 GHz Athlon runs at about 2% under load, and > most of that is from hardware interrupts). > > It looks like a lot of people use the Alix 2D13 for this, but I rejected > it for poor throughput (it would be great for the internet connection, but > it sounds like it might be a serious bottleneck between the internal > networks).
Are you open to purchasing a VLAN-capable switch for home use? While this might be considered overkill for home use, if you like data networks, VLANs tend to be invaluable. I did this years ago and I'm quite pleased with the flexibility of my home network as a result--that and my OpenBSD firewall at home is a used low-power legacy notebook with a single GigE em NIC that I picked up for 75USD. Cheers.
