[lug] Wanted: Tiny diskless, fanless Linux Box for Firewall/Router/Hub/NAT

[Nate Duehr]

I am a fan of the mini-itx machines for this type of project.  

www.mini-itx.com is a UK site that has a lot of information. 

"Diskless" would mean Compact Flash in this case probably, although MicroCenter has had some decent little 40 or 60 gig Samsung laptop drives on their "clearance" table as you enter the store for good prices recently. 

"Fanless" is easy -- the Via C3 chip does that. They also have the Eden and newer chips running around 1 GHz that have a tiny fan on them. 

There are some cases out there that are really nice for the mini-itx boards, but not a ton of US distributors for them.  Some places I've found will only sell the case with the motherboard as a combo, because the prices are fairly low on these things. Ebay is also a good place to hunt for this stuff. 

Buying a REALLY small case that needs laptop hard disks and laptop-sized CD/DVD-ROM drives can drive the end price up quite a bit also, but makes for an ultra small solution.  I currently have a very old original Via C3 533 MHz board in a standard desktop case... Pretty funny when you look inside, there's virtually nothing in there. 

They have quite a cult following... People do all sorts of weird and interesting things with such small low-power machines.  They make a few boards with dual-ethernet. You'd want that for a firewall. 

As far as software goes, you might like one of the dedicated firewall distros like IPCop or similar if you don't feel like mucking around with iptables.  I think it will do multiple external addresses, a DMZ interface to put public servers in and even wirless access point duties with the right hardware. You'd be hard-pressed to cram all of that onto a mini-itx machine I think, but with a riser card and two PCI slots, and some boards seem to have PCMCIA support -- you just might get it all in one of the medium-sized cases. 

Let us know what you end up with!  And photos if it's purrrrrty!  Heh. 

Nate
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Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com - WY0X