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mini ITX firewall

J

j_coddy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2008
Messages
298
I am thinking about buying a mini ITX motherboard with a VIA processor and configuring it as a firewall. I would be either using Ubuntu or installing Shorewall. I have never used an ITX board or a VIA processor. Will I run into any compatibility issues with either Ubuntu or Shorewall? If anyone has any feedback on linux firewalls it would be greatly appreciated.

mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153062
 
I can't help you directly. I am thinking of something similar, but haven't had time to do much testing. You will probably get more responses in the Networking sub forum. Also, in case you don't know, here are a few other firewall distros you can consider:
All are free (I am pretty sure) and have widely varying features and system requirements. As I said, I don't know much about them, but there is a good amount of info in the Networking forum.

As for the hardware, I looked at that board a while ago and saw that there were compatibility issues with the ethernet controller (Realtek 8110SC) and Linux. That was a while ago, so the situation may have changed, but make sure you look into that before buying.
 
j_coddy said:
I am thinking about buying a mini ITX motherboard with a VIA processor and configuring it as a firewall. I would be either using Ubuntu or installing Shorewall. I have never used an ITX board or a VIA processor. Will I run into any compatibility issues with either Ubuntu or Shorewall? If anyone has any feedback on linux firewalls it would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

I'm setting up my firewall on a Shuttle KPC and running pfSense. I've found that pfSense sees my Intel quad 10/100 ethernet card fine, but doesn't see the onboard ethernet in the KPC.

For mini-ITX, if I were you I'd consider waiting a few weeks for an Intel Atom based mini-ITX board, like the D945GCLF or MSI Wind. Much better performance per watt than VIA right now.
 
I think I will wait for an Atom processor. When i get the hardware i think I am going try Untangled. Thanks again for the suggestions.
 
I run a few smoothie firewalls. You don't need anything to really run them an old p3 will work. You can get out of newegg for everything you need for like around 150. Spending a lot of money on it is a waste of time imho.

I have never heard of shorewall but I am 95% sure the via board with work with smoothwall and would bet it would work with others. One way to find out.
 
Wait? They have one right now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121342

It seems like it's a very low-power CPU and it seems to offer pretty good performance.



I was also looking at that jetway board. I like it because it has dual lan... I would like to have a wireless PCI card.

I was having issues with the Dell PC I was using. It was running pfSense just fine but I wanted to remove the hard drive and run it off a compactflash card. I tried the embedded and it worked but it did not have the network drivers I needed. When I tried to boot the livecd it would work but the installer always says there are no hard disks in the system.
 
For a home or small business firewall, I'd just get a Linksys WRT54GL router. They have very good third-party firmware these days for firewalls, like OpenWrt and Tomato. You don't get the complexity, cost or power draw of a full PC solution, but you do get 802.11g and a 100mbit switch, which is useful.
 
I had the same problem when i tried to use pfsense. My onboard nic's are realtec's & pfsense could not see them so as a shot in the dark i gave monowall a shot & its been running solid for a couple months now.
 
ive used smoothwall, ipcop clarkconnect and others but i settled on what i think is the best- wrt54g with tomato firmware
 
I've done a little research on untangle.

I was looking at it for my own personal use. I have about 8 physical computers, and 2 virtual. The things I like about untangle is the fact you can block spam, spyware, and viruses. I don't have any extra hardware right now to play with it on, but I am planning on whipping something together and give it a whirl, and use it in conjunction of my Linksys wrt54g-tm with dd-wrt.

What I have read, is that if you plan to use the real time stuff like I am after, you need a cpu with cache. From what I have read, for 1 or 2 computers, the via units should be fine, but are still slow. I am looking at using something like a p4 2.6c and at least a gig of ram and an 80 gig hard drive. A lot of the people there seem to dis-favor the via chipsets.
 
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