recommend hardware firewall

[Kwan Lowe]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 11:33 AM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:

> Remember that there are also power costs. The $50 routers don't draw as much
> power as an old repurposed general purpose machine is going to. They also
> come with wireless support.
>
> Depending on what you are going to do with the firewall, it might also be
> cheaper to buy just one network card and an unmanaged switch. (8 port switches
> were going for about $20 a few years ago.)

I'm putting together an Atom-based system for just this purpose. Power
consumption is not as low as a $50 router (and probably never could
be), but I'm adding three NICs (1 dual, 1 single port) so that I can
create a DMZ and LAN and a separate management port.  It should come
in at just under $250, which is quite a bit less than a dedicated
router/firewall with similar capability.

Though Fedora is an option, I may end up using one of the Firewall
distros since they include some nice web front-ends.