recommend hardware firewall

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:57:14 -0400,
  Kwan Lowe <kwan at digitalhermit.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

Note that you can do this with the $50 routers as well. The hardware in
those cheap boxes is pretty amazing. The two Buffalo routers I have
(WHR G54S and WHR G125) have hardware switchs that do vlans. So with proper
configuration you have vlans supported by hardware. (The default is for
the 4 lan ports to be in the same vlan and to bridge that with the wireless
port.)

Your machine is probably better if you want to run services on the firewall
(such as asterisk or a web server), but for just firewalling and traffic
control, you probably could get by with a $50 router.