Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?

johnpoz

@thewaterbug said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

It's been flawless for the last 6.5 years.

Not sure how you do math? But 2.3 released on 2016-04-12, so how do you come up with 6.5 years?

Running something that is not maintained is not good idea in IT.. Thats fine you don not want to run the latest bleeding edge code.. But you should be within the maintained versions..

Your not going to get any help - your not going to be able to update any packages, and you sure and the hell will not be secure from any issues found, etc.

jimp

@johnpoz said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

@thewaterbug said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:
It's been flawless for the last 6.5 years.

Not sure how you do math? But 2.3 released on 2016-04-12, so how do you come up with 6.5 years?

It could have been running pfSense of some vintage for that long, and just on 2.3 now because it can't go any higher.

@johnpoz said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

Running something that is not maintained is not good idea in IT.. Thats fine you don not want to run the latest bleeding edge code.. But you should be within the maintained versions..

Sounds like he knows that and he's replacing it already, but wondering if there is some non-firewall role he can use it for.

dotdash

You can run OpenWRT on them, there is also a m0n0 fork that seems to still be getting basic security updates- t1n1wall. There are other options, but I don't see much of a use case beyond a simple/sub 100mb firewall.

KOM

Depending on its power draw, you might just junk it. I'm not familiar with these units but if ti's low-power then you could do lots of things with it. Some ideas:

TT-RSS
Nextcloud
Smokeping

jimp

@kom said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

Depending on its power draw, you might just junk it. I'm not familiar with these units but if ti's low-power then you could do lots of things with it. Some ideas:

ALIX is super low power, can even work from PoE. If you can find something that doesn't require much CPU power, it could still be useful.

KOM

@jimp Duh, I didn't realize that the m1n1wall was an ALIX board. The '2D13' should have clued me in. Live & learn.

TheWaterbug

@johnpoz when I was in high school, I thought I was good at math. Then I got to college and realized I'm good at arithmetic. Math is a whole 'nother thing!

TheWaterbug

@jimp said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

ALIX is super low power, can even work from PoE. If you can find something that doesn't require much CPU power, it could still be useful.

It's not wired for POE, is it?

jimp

@thewaterbug said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

It's not wired for POE, is it?

Yeah it is, see https://pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm
Though I'm not sure if it's standard PoE or what. I haven't tried to power one that way.

TheWaterbug

@jimp said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

@thewaterbug said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

It's not wired for POE, is it?

Yeah it is, see https://pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm
Though I'm not sure if it's standard PoE or what. I haven't tried to power one that way.

Wow! This old board certainly has legs!

"Power: DC jack or passive POE, min. 7V to max. 20V"

I have a passive POE switch (12 V) in my wiring closet already. I should try it.

dotdash

It's non-standard PoE. You have to get an adapter, but PC Engines still shows stock, and they are only two bucks.

TheWaterbug

@dotdash said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

It's non-standard PoE. You have to get an adapter, but PC Engines still shows stock, and they are only two bucks.

Ah, yes, that reminds me that my POE switch isn't passive; it's 802.af. I was confusing it with a Ubiquiti POE switch that does both, to support its older WAPs and wireless bridges.

Yeah, there's no published standard for passive POE, but nearly every implementation I've seen uses the same pinout as the PC Engines adapter, e.g. pins 4/5 for power and 7/8 for GND. For example I bought a few sets of these awhile back for my RPi camera:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J6JP8XE/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

and they use the same pinout.

TheWaterbug

I wonder if ffmpeg would run on it, not to do any actual transcoding, but just as a relay station from my cameras to YouTube. CPU usage of this application on my RPi is about 2%, but the Pi seems to crap out every few hours or so, for reasons that I don't understand.

TheWaterbug

@thewaterbug said in Re-purposing an ancient m1n1wall?:

I will be replacing an APU2-based appliance with an MTB-2220, and that APU2 will then replace an ancient 2D13-based m1n1wall that's been in service since 2012.

And now I'm seeing that I'm mistaken about my middle-aged units. They're actually "Netgate APU2" units, which are based on the PCEngines APU1 board, not the PCEngines APU2 board. So they lack AES-NI hardware acceleration. So I have:

Two new MBT-2220 units with hardware AES-NI
Two middle-aged Netgate "APU2" units, which are based on PCEngines APU1 boards
One ancient Netgate m1n1wall, based on the old Alix board.

That makes me want to buy a true PCEngines APU2 board with AES-NI. If I get one with 3 Ethernet ports, will that fit into my original 2D13 Alix case from this m1n1wall?

dotdash

The case should fit, but they are under $10. I know the second generation cases (the ones you didn't have to remove the board from the case to swap the cf) will fit. The older ones will probably work, as the layout of the APU series matches the Alix boards. (The exception being the new quad GB APU)

JeGr

As for repurposing: some things like PiHole or Smokeping or Monitoring also came into my mind. I've just dug out an old Raspi1 and thrown some PiHole on it (just for checking some details) and it runs it quite nice. Old Alix or APU1 should do that too. Also IRC or home automation like OpenHAB could be another fun thing to tinker around with.

TheWaterbug

Ooooh. How about a dedicated box to run the UniFi management software? I've been wanting to install that on pfsense forever, but it has issues running inside pfsense.