On Sun, Oct 3, 2010 at 11:02 PM, Nick Holland <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10/03/10 22:11, David Higgs wrote: >> I am building a replacement router/firewall for home use > > stop there. > > You aren't General Motors, Yahoo, or Google. > You are looking to spend a lot of time and money trying to optimize > performance on a super-fast-sport-car that will be only used to go to > and from work in rush hour traffic. You aren't going any faster than > the guy in front of you is going, or in this case, than your ISP is > handing you data. > > There is nothing built in the last 10 years that can't do a home > router/firewall like this for most people, with the exception of a few > crappy super-low-power systems that people like to suggest as the answer > to all questions (and then complain when the pathetic NICs and anemic > CPUs don't pump data like a ten year old machine with non-pathetic NICs > does). > > NONE OF IT WILL MATTER TO YOU.
Yeah, you got me -- I know it's overkill. But give me a little credit, I don't plan on tweaking knobs or compiling custom kernels to squeeze performance. I outgrew that phase five years ago on my circa 1999 desktop-turned-router that just recently passed on. To stick with the car analogy, I just want a reliable new car with better gas mileage, that will get me through the next 10 years or more. > Realtek NICs, three digit celeron processors, the worst of the worst > will pump more data than your ISP will deliver, so what do you gain by > tweaking for the last one percent of data flow you will never see? > > Conventional stuff will cost less and run more reliably than fancy > stuff, and while you may save a few watts, you are unlikely to recoup > your investment. > > And why would you put an SSD on a firewall? so you can discover they > are a lot more expensive and less reliable than an old hard disk? If > you want fast and reliable, use an old, burned in HD, and back up your > /etc directory. If you want low power or silent, get a CF adapter and a > small CF card, or if your hw can boot from it, a USB flash drive. I was researching SSDs to make the box quieter and maybe lower power; I/O speed was just a bonus. I can just as easily use spinning platters until SSD tech improves and/or converges with OpenBSD support. I'll google up some smaller systems (Soekris, ALIX, etc?) and see how they strike me. Pointers here are even more welcome, as I am not as familiar with this end of the spectrum and want to avoid the aforementioned "crappy super-low-power systems." Thanks for the input. --david
