Roll Your Own Firewall, Part II
The 12U rack arrived this week and I assembled it in about 15 minutes, and due to the small size, it rack will fit under most desks.
I hesitated on pulling the trigger on the purchase of the 1GHz VIA 1U bare bones system. I wanted to look for a cheaper/"better" solution. I even looked at FPGA development kits, but quickly concluded that anything I chose would only be cost effective in large quantities. After some serious research, it appears that the quiet, passively cooled VIA processor is exactly what I want.
The 1GHz via combo is is powered by a passively cooled x86 processors that use just 7W at clock speeds up to 1GHz. The chips also feature hardware-based AES encryption and dual Random Number Generators (RNGs). With a powered disk drive, the entire unit can pull less than 50 W -- that is less than most light bulbs.
Additionally, I believe I will have enough CPU left over there to make the server a Asterisk/VOIP server as well.
So, the evil plan is now:
- Purchase the 1U/1Ghz via server
- install Linux from scratch
- install/setup SmoothWall
- install/setup Asterisk
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