[nycbug-talk] building home firewalls out of soekris boxen

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Jerry B. Altzman wrote:
>
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> Anyone local here spend much time *still* with Soekris boxes?
>
> Never played with them, but I have a PCEngines Alix box on the way to setup 
> with pfsense for a client:
>
> http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60&products_id=492

Just to follow-up, it arrived this week and I just installed PFSense on 
it.  Very neat hardware, pretty zippy too for 500MHz.  The 256MB RAM seems 
like enough - pfsense (embedded version) throws /tmp and /var in memory 
filesystems.  I did need to upgrade the BIOS out of the box to make 
FreeBSD happy, but there was an image with FreeDOS, the new BIOS and the 
flash utility on the PCEngines site.

My only other problem was that my CF writer turned out to be junk so I had 
to let RatShack gouge me for a new one...

If anyone has any questions about the hardware, let me know.

Charles

> It seemed like a much better value than Soekris.
>
> Just thought I'd throw that out there.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles
>
>> I'm thinking of building a new firewall or two for the home, I'd like to 
>> try something OTHER than OpenWRT (since I already have a nice wireless 
>> gateway, thankyouverymuch...) and the little boxes just ... appeal to me.
>> 
>> Comments? Praises? Brickbats?
>> 
>> Either post here, or send to me & I'll summarize back.
>> 
>> Thanks!
>> 
>> //jbaltz
>> -- 
>> jerry b. altzman  jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com  +1 718 763 7405
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>