Thank you everyone for your replies! :) It's been great having an
operational type discussion.
Here is my summary of the thread:
Software:
Linux:
Vyatta
IPCop
Astaro
BSD:
pfSense
m0n0wall (I didn't know this was the base for pfSense until I started
researching it today)
Appliances:
Juniper. I have taken a Juniper course and have the Oreilly book, but
I'm a Cisco guy pretty much through and through.
Cisco 871 (I see these pop up on craigslist a fair amount. I suppose
I'll pick one up and add it to my lab)
Fritz!box (not available in the US) :( << I would love to get my hands
on one of these.
Hardware:
Alix/Gumstix/Sokeris
Various full desktop systems
I got some great hardware sizing advice offline which referenced
http://www.pfsense.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=49
My choice:
pfSense on a Dell Optiplex (dual core, 1 gig of ram). I think this
should be more then sufficient for performing WAN duties and routing on
a stick for my 3548 switch. I currently have an 1841 performing those
duties and really like it. However I need it for my cisco cert studies. :)
I was originally going to deploy pfSense in a KVM VM, but it appears BSD
paravirtualization support may not be up to the level that Linux is at.
If anyone has experience with this, please let me know. I have
everything else deployed in virtual machines, but after reading a bit it
seems that pfSense in a VM would consume a lot of CPU resources even
doing moderate amounts of traffic (10 mbps). I don't want to starve out
my other virtual machines.
