System specs needed for a *nix Gateway/Firewall

A

awsiemieniec

Gawd
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Jul 2, 2004
Messages
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I have quite a few old pieces of hardware that I'm going to stuff into a box and make a gateway/firewall for my home. I'm just not convinced the built-in protection on the D-Link is all that great. I will either be running SmoothWall Express 3 or FreeBSD with the Ports collection. Since it'll be used at home, it'll only have to play IP-traffic cop to five machines. I wouldn't think a beefy or modern system would be needed for such an application. Maybe something in the PIII range or even an old Celeron in the 500MHz area. I don't want an over kill because I don't want the noise of a CPU fan running all the time - so If I could passively cool it, that'd be great.

Only requirement is that the software has to be free. I could do a Windows environment (Server 2003 or XP) but Windows brings a lot of overhead to it thus making the hardware requirements a bit more.

And on a side note, if any users who have experience on this topic want to chime in on what their software solution is, I'd appreciate it.

Eventually I'd also like to add a proxy to it but I'm not decided on that yet...

Thanks,
@WS
 
No overhead with what you want to build with the specs you mention go with windows 2000. Or any flavor of Linux would do right back to a 486 box.
 
It really depends on what you're seaking by security.

Untangle is a UTM (Unified Threat Management) appliance, so it not only acts as a firewall, but will monitor all traffic and look for nasties and things of that nature. Depending on how much you plan on using the features depends on the hardware.

If you're just looking for a *nix based firewall without all the goodies, Untangle is a bit overkill . . .
 
Celeron 500 will be fine. I suggest at least 128MB RAM, more the better.

A fast HDD is a must for a proxy. 20-40GB minimum is good.
 
d3c1us said:
If you're just looking for a *nix based firewall without all the goodies, Untangle is a bit overkill . . .
Click to expand...

For starters: you can shut on or off the features that you want to use. Nobody says he has to use them all.

Secondly, what the hell is "overkill" if the product is FREE?

And third: Untangle will run on a P3 just fine. I've got 60 folks in one of our offices on untangle with a P3 and 1 GB of RAM. It's very light on resources.
 
I love Untangle..use it at many clients....however, for the home user, it's a bit "much". Somewhat steeper requirements as far as horsepower.

I run PFSense on an old midrange P3 laptop...an IBM Thinkpad T23, Pentium 3 800something, 256 megs of RAM, I stuck in a PCMCIA NIC as the 2nd NIC (laptop has onboard Intel).

Low energy requirements, low noise, low heat output, small footprint..and a built in battery backup!

PFSense is also one of the best as far as traffic shaping/QoS...so the kid torrenting or wife doing heavy surfing doesn't bother my online gaming.
 
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