Graham Toal wrote:
Depends if you're saying "embedded" because you need the form factor,
or just to keep the price low. If the latter, you can get some
good deals on desktops if you look around.
I bought a nice Dell server for about $240 last year, leaving change
for a couple of extra ether cards. 1Gb cards are dirt cheap nowadays;
I got both of mine for about $30 at one of those weekend sales
from CompUSA and Office Max (very suprised about the latter). Both
were on one-per-customer mailin rebates...
So I got an OpenBSD firewall/spamfilter *and* a server I could use
for backing up my PC out of the deal... (Disk drive was 250Gb SATA
which was effectively free because I'd had one die on me earlier in
the year which I'ld already replaced, then for this server I sent
the dead one back to Maxtor who replaced it for free with a new one)
The server was on the Dell "small business" program. Quite often near
the end of a quarter they'll dump stuff at or below cost just to bump
up their numbers for their quarterly report. Obviously you need
patience to wait for one of these - they don't happen every day :-)
(Slightly related; I picked up a 200Gb Maxtor IDE drive in the
Black Friday sales for $30. It'll sit waiting for the next
project. Finally in rebellion for thirty years of paying through
the nose for bleeding-edge early adopter prices, I've decided that
from now on I'll only buy loss-leader sale items as much as
I possibly can :-) )
Graham
The biggest reason I was choosing to go embedded is that I wanted a
system that did not have moving parts. This was to hopefully extend the
life of the machine and increase uptime by eliminating the hard drives
and power supplies with moving parts. I am not paying for power so I
can say that I am not concerned about consumption at this point. This
is only due to the fact that $ is finite at the present time and cannot
weigh heavily on the list of importance.
The alternative is to use a dual P3 that we have but I am still
interested in optimum availibility. Do I implement RAID 1 with two
drives.....OR does this create more problems that it is worth by
introducing more parts to fail(two drives. Do I implement a Flash card
reader and install OpenBSD/pf on a compact flash drive? I am not sure
where I should be drawing the line...I mean do I pay attention to drive
redundency or power redundency....or even actual firewall redundency?
What is the most bang for the buck in terms of availibility short of a
hot standby firewall configuration?
