* Rodney Hopkins <rhopk...@team.camaroz28.com> [19-06-2010 17:07]: > What are people's opinions and experiences on running OpenBSD as a home > firewall on a laptop?
We all know that notebooks are not made to be used as firewalls. But, for a home firewall I think that an old notebook may be a nice quiet and low powered server+ups+keyboard+monitor combo in a very small box. I have actually used an old toshiba celeron/1Ghz/256Mb/20Gb as my home firewall for almost five years (retired it recently). > > I'm considering converting my old firewall running on a P200MMX with 96M > of RAM over to a laptop with a couple of add-in PCMCIA NICs. I tried this aproach with two pcmcia nics but it got too hot and unstable (maybe some cooling problem specific to my notebook). I solved it with usb-ethernet adapters. > > I've read concerns about laptops (and components, including hard drives) > not being designed for 24x7 running, having to constantly have the screen > open so that proper cooling can take place through the keyboard, etc., I did not have any of these problems. > > That's the kind of reliability I'm looking for in a laptop-based firewall. > I would not rely on such machine for anything else but home firewalling/filtering, if that is your case you will probably not get frustrated. Regards, -- Carlos
