A search on fleabay shows that, in Australia, they still fetch >$300, out of my price range. :(
On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 10:30 PM, Stuart Henderson <s...@spacehopper.org> wrote: > On 2016-12-15, Aaron Mason <simplersolut...@gmail.com> wrote: >> All >> >> I'm looking for a 1U appliance that I can re-purpose into a firewall >> using OpenBSD. I've tried the near-free method by using an old Lacie >> Ethernet Disk appliance I had lying around, but it turns out the >> onboard SATA chipset is toast on this particular unit (it freezes at >> CDBOOT when it detects hard drives and the BIOS freezes when I set it >> to IDE mode with drives attached, plus it only has one onboard NIC and >> one PCI slot, so I can't install another SATA card without removing >> the other NIC I installed), so I'm looking for other options that fit >> a limited budget. >> >> The most important criteria are that it must be 1U and it must fit >> within a 420mm (~16.5") space (for reasons I will explain below). I >> have a couple of Sun Netra X1s that meet the need, but I can't push >> more than ~60mbps over the onboard FE ports and they run quite hot to >> the point of causing kernel panics. >> >> For a bit of context - I manage network and systems for a group that >> run regular LAN parties at a local university, and our network >> infrastructure lives in a 4RU flight case (with 420mm between the >> front and rear vertical rails) currently occupied by three HP >> switches. We're currently using a Sun V20Z (admittedly running >> pfSense, a decision made before I took over) but it's rather >> cumbersome to carry along with three Dell 1950s (two VM hosts and a >> Steam cache) and a Dell 2950 (NAS, provides iSCSI to VM hosts). We >> don't usually get more than 35 players and we don't do any complex >> filtering on the firewall. >> >> I've been considering looking at old firewall appliances like Nokias, >> Sonicwalls, Watchguards or Barracudas - has anyone had any luck with >> getting OpenBSD on any of those or other such appliances? >> >> Gigabit ports would be nice (the university finally bought gigabit PoE >> switches) but will accept Fast Ethernet if my budget says no. > > IMHO, you can get a fairly useful decent second-hand machine for a low > enough price that it's not worth the hassle repurposing or using something > from before GE was common, they're going to be more hassle to get working, > and old enough that you may well run into things failing through age. > > How about a Dell R210 or an R210 II off ebay? 400mm deep, 2 nics onboard, > if you need more ports then dual-port PCIe nics are pretty cheap. > If you want to cut down on weight+noise at the expense of more cost > and a less powerful cpu, maybe APU2 in a 1U case or something like > supermicro SYS-5018A-FTN4. > -- Aaron Mason - Programmer, open source addict I've taken my software vows - for beta or for worse
