From a dlink DI-604 to an old Optiplex GX-1 acquired for 50$ (CDN!) running smoothwall, we're talking a step up here buddy pal. Got that box with 768MB of PC-100 SDRAM! Do you really think I was going to settle for less ?
First, I decided I was going to run OpenBSD. OK, I'm Canadian  An when I installed FreeBSD, it barfed at my French Canadian keyboard 
But, more to the point, PF was born with OpenBSD. So why the hell not.
OK, so do I recycle my GX-1 ? Build a new mini-ITX box ?
First and foremost, WTH do I want this box to do.
1- Gateway/Firewall
2- Proxy and url filtering (using a 1.1 million entry blacklist with a redirector)
Maybe more.
The date is July 2007.
So, I know my GX-1 cannot handle that big of a blacklist without running 100% CPU for 45 minutes. Next, a mini-ITX set-up is rather costly.
What to do ?
Here's the plan:
1- uATX motherboard
2- Cheap low powered processor
3- Lots of cheap ram
4- Case ? Who cares, this will live in my furnace room!
So I picked the ASRock Wolfdale, the Celeron 420 and 1G of el cheapo 667Mhz DDR2 ram. A 250G sata drive (wth, they're cheap) and a no name bizzare case did the trick.
So I get more memory, more HD storage space, twice the processing power for about the same power consumption.
Woohoo parts ordered, let's start downloading!
Next: a complete list of required software, and the joys of compiling to get what you really want (and need).
DB
|
08-13-2009 10:56 PM 
