Thanks in advance for humoring me with my unimportant story and questions...
For the last few years a FreeBSD box running IPF has been protecting my little home cable modem network. Back then I was having fun hacking around teaching myself Unix. Once I finally migrated to OSX from System 9 I stopped playing around with Unix except for my little firewall and occasional peeks under OS X's hood. A recent storm took out my power supply on that firewall box. Unfortunately it was a proprietary power supply. I liberated a FreeBSD box out of the closet loaded with FreeBSD 4.11 and tried to duplicate my old firewall. Despite extensive documentation of my old system files I could not get this new box to work as my firewall. While searching around for a solutions I came across m0n0wall and PFSense. Getting them to install and work was very simple, especially PFSense, which was installed on a hard drive. Next I read about using a CF card instead of a hard drive. A few days later my IDE/CF adapter arrived and in minutes I had PFSense running off the compactflash card. My old Geek Hacker self was re-emerging. :) Then I read about the Soekris boxes. My router/firewall is in the basement so noise is not an issue. Now that I have the CF installed a power supply failure is the only weak link in the box. But since this was a home-built box it has a standard PS which will be easy to replace if necessary. The only reason I can come up with to plunk down $243 for a 4801, power supply and shipping, is to save power. I calculated my current router/firewall expends about 200 watts to run. That costs me $110 a year to power If my calculations are correct. If the 4801 takes 10 watts to power that would cost $5.50 a year. Is this a good enough rationalization? What is a reasonable lifespan of a Soekris box? _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
