Is this overkill?
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We are going to wire our house with Cat5e at some point soon, and since we are just going to connect them all to a Gigabit switch we would need some form of firewall between it and the cable modem. I have been looking around at various options, from building my own pc-based one to buying a used FireBox off of eBay, and then I came across this:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260537747447&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT
(it has two Broadcom 5702 Gigabit adapters)
Now, to me a dual-socket AMD server seems a bit overkill, and so will a lot of you, but they are selling them for £44! I don't have much on my home network (file/media server, 3 desktops, Wii + PS3, netbook, various portable devices) but at that price I don't see why not. I would quite like everything to be as rack-based as possible since I am seriously considering using a LackRack (http://lackrack.org) to store all of the networking equipment. If required, I could just use one of the crappy old Belkin wireless routers that I have lying around (I have a Linksys WRT320N and a WRT160N (with DD-WRT) as well). As a firewall/DHCP server, it would need to run for weeks at a time, so that might be one area of issue with using a second-hand server, or alternatively one of the still-POSTing computers left at a dump.
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I'm pretty sure it will be overkill and it sure will cost a lot in power to keep runng 24/7
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I don't pay for the power yet, since I'm 14. :) I can see your point though, but I would need to work out how much power it would actually use in practice (it has a 400W PSU, but it won't really be working at full throttle).
I have looked at some of the other posts on this forum and it seems that you can run pfSense on one of the FireBox units. If I did this, would there be any difference in performance vs. the server? (Apart from the lack of Gigabit ethernet, that is)
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Overkill? YEAH, by quite a bit! I have a little dual core Intel Atom 1.6ghz FIT-PC running pfSense at my house, with 6 VPN connections and never see over 40% utilization on the processor. Plus, the little FIT-PC uses around 7w of power. Something like what you're looking at will draw way too much power for a house, plus, look how deep it is.
You can find something much smaller I'm sure and certainly something that will save you money on your electric bill.
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Get a Supermicro X7SPA and you should be fine - will use less than 20 Watts in total and you got 2*1 GB Intel nics
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Right now, it seems increasingly likely that I will just get a Firebox x700, but only if the Realtek Ethernet problems have been fixed. If possible I would use an old thin client off of eBay but 1. I'm not sure how easy it is to install alternative native OSes on it and 2. I don't see any that have dual Ethernet ports. Pity :(