Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> I have been using an old laptop as my firewall - running SL5
> like all my other computers. 
> 
> I recently purchased an ALIX 2D3 single board computer ( designed
> by PC Engines of Switzerland, http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm 
> and sold by netgate.com for $180 with case and power supply). 
> The board has 3 ethernet ports ( WAN, LAN, DMZ ), 256MB of RAM,
> and uses a 500MHz AMD Geode X86-compatible processor with
> built-in AES crypto engine (for speeding up VPN links).  It uses
> a Compact Flash card for "disk" though it also has a header that
> can connect to a PATA hard drive.  No video display, though there
> are USB connectors and a mini-PCI slot on the board where a 
> display card can be added.
> 
> The board draws less than 4 watts operating.  So it is about 3X
> faster than the old laptop, and 10x less power.  Some people are
> setting these up with the OpenWRT distro, but that is optimized
> for small flash footprint, and has too many bugs IMHO.  I tried
> that for a few frustrating days, and gave up.
> 
> I attached the CF card to a USB adapter, attached that to a
> diskless desktop computer, and installed from the SL5 DVD.  After
> tweaking /etc/fstab , /boot/grub/menu.lst , and /etc/inittab for
> a serial console and different drive names, the card booted fine
> on the ALIX.  I made some flash-friendly changes (noatime, remote
> logging, ramdisk /tmp, etc).  I also added a rc file to copy the
> MAC address of my old WAN connection.  I am moving the config
> files from the old firewall laptop now, and will deploy soon.

Just a caution.
I don't use IPcop, but I did have a quick look at it, and a friend of 
mine likes it.

It's been running from CF for years, there are CF->IDE adaptors around. 
Apparently the IPCop folk have some CF-friendly kernel patches it might 
be worth checking out for.




-- 

Cheers
John

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