I have been using an old laptop as my firewall - running SL5 like all my other computers.
I recently purchased an ALIX 2D3 single board computer ( designed by PC Engines of Switzerland, http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm and sold by netgate.com for $180 with case and power supply). The board has 3 ethernet ports ( WAN, LAN, DMZ ), 256MB of RAM, and uses a 500MHz AMD Geode X86-compatible processor with built-in AES crypto engine (for speeding up VPN links). It uses a Compact Flash card for "disk" though it also has a header that can connect to a PATA hard drive. No video display, though there are USB connectors and a mini-PCI slot on the board where a display card can be added. The board draws less than 4 watts operating. So it is about 3X faster than the old laptop, and 10x less power. Some people are setting these up with the OpenWRT distro, but that is optimized for small flash footprint, and has too many bugs IMHO. I tried that for a few frustrating days, and gave up. I attached the CF card to a USB adapter, attached that to a diskless desktop computer, and installed from the SL5 DVD. After tweaking /etc/fstab , /boot/grub/menu.lst , and /etc/inittab for a serial console and different drive names, the card booted fine on the ALIX. I made some flash-friendly changes (noatime, remote logging, ramdisk /tmp, etc). I also added a rc file to copy the MAC address of my old WAN connection. I am moving the config files from the old firewall laptop now, and will deploy soon. Which raises a question - is anybody else on this list interested in my notes on how I am doing this? I can put a write-up on my wiki if so, otherwise I may forget some of what I did. With SL5 driving massive computation clusters consuming megawatts at the high end of the spectrum, it is nice to know that SL5 is also useful at the low power end, too. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
