Mini *nix distro appliances, seeking product.

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YeOldeStonecat

[H]F Junkie
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Jul 19, 2004
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Any input/suggestions on little firewall appliances in the US market?

I'm coming up on a project that I'd like to use PFSense to establish a WAN. 5x satellite offices over PPPoE DSL, and 1x central office that will be on a bonded T.

Need to find a small appliance...some of the satellites are located in very small offices in some courthouses and a police station. So I'd like to find some small appliances that are similar in size to a traditional router....2x ethernet ports...if it has a built in 4 port switch on the LAN side even better.

Never had to go shopping for this before, for home setups and friends and a few other situations, I've used small form factor desktops, and laptops. But in this case...I'd like a true hardware appliance of very small size.

In looking around this morning, came across Hacom
http://www.hacom.net/catalog/

Price is also a factor...as this is a very tight non-profit agency.

The satellite offices don't need much power..most are 1 - 2 PCs behind them, one of them is 3x PCs. So some little 300MHz 256 meg appliance is way more than adequate.

Central office I'll desire a beefier box...approx 30 users full time, plus the central point for the remote VPN tunnels.
 
Something to consider on those small appliances is actual through put. The hacom I've looked at in the past onyl allow 80mb of total throughput and 6mb of ipsec throughput. Pretty low.

For these situations I've always use IBM thin clients. They have a CF slot on board and only have one little tiny fan so they are almost completely silent. I put two external nic cards in them and load m0n0wall. Not much to fail, almost no moving parts and can handle most small business environments. Best of all the total setup is less than $100.
 
I'd go with PFsense and the thin client route. I like not having a lot of things that could fail :)
 
supergper said:
Something to consider on those small appliances is actual through put. The hacom I've looked at in the past onyl allow 80mb of total throughput and 6mb of ipsec throughput. Pretty low.

For these situations I've always use IBM thin clients. They have a CF slot on board and only have one little tiny fan so they are almost completely silent. I put two external nic cards in them and load m0n0wall. Not much to fail, almost no moving parts and can handle most small business environments. Best of all the total setup is less than $100.
Click to expand...

Interested in looking at these....linkies? :D
Under a hundred bucks? Wow.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Interested in looking at these....linkies? :D
Under a hundred bucks? Wow.
Click to expand...
www.ebay.com :D

Just search "ibm thin client" and you'll see them. For the price, they work great. In all of them that I have deployed (I bet I've deployed close to 50 of them), I've not had a single problem (there just isn't much to go wrong with them).
 
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I have an OpenBrick-E that I haven't been using for a while, but at one point it was loaded with m0n0wall. Hacom is the US Distributor for the OpenBrick systems, and they have flash images of a couple firewall distros on their website made for the OpenBrick(m0n0wall and pFsense, I believe). I'd be willing to get rid of it for cheap, PM me for details if you're interested.
 
Look at Supermicros offerings, they sell short depth 1u systems that can be ear mounted and are pretty compatible with just about everything. While it's not an "appliance" per se, it has the size and dimensions as one.
 
Buy a $50 consumer router and install DD-WRT and have yourself a full fledged router/switch supportings routing, VLAN tagging, QoS, Firewall, etc.
 
torular said:
Buy a $50 consumer router and install DD-WRT and have yourself a full fledged router/switch supportings routing, VLAN tagging, QoS, Firewall, etc.
Click to expand...

Oh I've used DD-WRT, Hyper-WRT, Tomato, etc for many many years. Fun to dork around with at home, but it's kidnergarden stuff compared to PFSense or Untangle in the business environment. ;) (unless you're using DD in AP mode for wireless in some super small budget setups)

These heavier duty *nix distros will kick the shit out of a little Stinky wrt w/dd-wrt without even breaking a sweat.
 
yeolde, if they are on a budget you may have to do like a Shuttle route with a atom. Have em out the door at about 300 a pop for the unit. Bigger but if they are on a budget it may be what they have to do.
 
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