The Iggblog

So I put down a bid today for some new firewall hardware (the one I found is used and about $13,750 cheaper). The Pipboy has served me well, but it has some shortcomings. Mostly this concerns the age of the its hardware. It’s not that it is flaky or failing (aside from the screen starting to get too dim to read, but I rarely administer locally), it’s that the PCI revision is too old for modern communications hardware. It has uses PCI 2.1, which has 5v signaling. Any wireless ethernet or gigabit ethernet cards pretty much all use PCI 2.2, which has 3.3v signaling. So poor pipboy is stuck in the dark ages of wire-only, 100-speed ethernet. It’s not that I want to use wireless heavily or that I have devices with gig-E interfaces… it’s that I’d like the option. I can fit 2 ethernet and one wireless, and still have room to spare. Reading up on the specs at the first link on this post, it seems to be very well geared towards robustnesswhich greatly interests me in a device that I need to remain on 24/7. The current pipboy is this thing’s older brother, and I’ve been very happy with the Dolch brand so far. BTW if any of you bid on that, Igg will become a sad panda.

Eventually I’d like to get myself a Soekris net5501. These portable-desktop type machines I’m using and looking into are a great flexible solution but are also overkill. the net5501 was built specifically for BSD operating systems for the purpose of being a router/firewall. They are solid state, silent, and operate at very low power levels (~20 watts). It also comes in a nice slim case that’s only slightly larger than a consumer linksys router and is easily hidden, unlike Pipboy. Note that in the pic it’s a rear-facing open box sitting on top of a front facing closed one. The empty space in the box is room for a PCI card, typically wireless networking. For something as small and simple as it is, it’s a very sophisticated machine. But for the board and box it’d run upwards of $400. The one I found is slightly (read: a lot) cheaper than that. So for now I’m going to stick with what’s free/cheap. but when I’m doing less tinkering and I want something to run silently and cheaply for extended periods with little interaction needed, I’ll be looking into a net5501. With 4 ethernet ports, wireless, optional hardware encryption acceleration (via mini-pci), and running openbsd it’s pretty much all the hardware I’d ever need for firewall/routing purposes.

Ok, done nerding for the time. carry on.