[clue-tech] Mini-itx and pico-itx

[Dan Poler]

> Has anyone built a firewall box along these lines, and do you have any
> advice? 

Just yesterday I stood up a new firewall running pfsense
(www.pfsense.com), which is derived from m0n0wall -- another interesting
firewall platform. Pfsense is neat because it's FreeBSD based but
borrows heavily from other platforms (pf from OpenBSD, etc) and comes
with a nice management GUI built right in.

It's also really nifty because they provide it in various manners -- it
can be installed to hard storage on the device, it can run off of LiveCD
with only the configuration written to hard storage (be it CF, SD, usb
disk, etc), and they also provide a version designed to be used with an
embedded device.

I've only been playing with it for about 12 hours, but thus far I'm
greatly impressed by its quality. Cool stuff. Comes recommended to me by
a friend who's worked for a network security vendor for five years. 

On another note, I've used in the past USR 8200 SoHo firewalls -- also
excellent, about $300, run Linux under the hood, great web GUI that lets
you do far more than your average home router -- handles inbound VPN,
usb/firewire ports for file service, etc. While it's fun to build a box
to do exactly what you want, it's also nice to find an off-the-shelf
product that does it too with no hassle. :)
http://www.usr.com/products/networking/router-product.asp?sku=USR8200 

dap

-- 
Dan Poler, RHCE
Senior Consultant
Red Hat, Inc.
E-Mail: dpoler at redhat.com

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