[Damo]

Yes I know, this is the fab section. I figured anything you use a grinder on is fair game

I'm running pfSense as my firewall and network routing device. It's currently running on an old IBM desktop but that's taking up too much room. I've recently put a bunch of my gear into a little comms 19" rack. It's only 250 deep though so a lot of PC stuff won't fit in there, so I decided to make my own.

Case is a gutted old V.35 inline probe. I kept the power supply as it was still good, it feeds 12v to a 120w Pico PSU. Motherboard is a little ITX Intel Atom with 1gb RAM. HDD is a 1gb IDE flash drive.




Motherboard is mounted to the case with nuserts. I used a 5" grinder and a flap disk to bring them down to the right height I had to order some proper heat sinks and fans as well as the PCI adapter. This lets me plug 2 NICs into the single PCI slot of the mobo. I'm just running el cheapo TP-Link NICs




PCI adapter is mounted to fabricated brackets pop riveted to the case, adapter is pop riveted to the brackets


Since this thing will be on 24/7 the Atom board is a good choice as it has low power consumption. It has 3 NICs all up, one will connect to my ethernet ADSL modem, the other two will be 801.q trunks to my managed switch. All gigabit stuff so I should get some decent throughput.

[tanshi]

geek!!

wish i could be othered setting up shit like this at home

[Damo]

tanshi wrote:

geek!!

wish i could be othered setting up shit like this at home

I'm hearin' ya, it only took me about 5 years

[alien]

but how will that get us out of the matrix?

[rustyzook]

whats pfSense like to use? setup etc maintain?

ive only ever used ipcop, tryed smoothwall but was a bit odd.

nice setup!

[Damo]

rustyzook wrote:

whats pfSense like to use? setup etc maintain?

ive only ever used ipcop, tryed smoothwall but was a bit odd.

nice setup!

I like it better than smoothwall. I didn't use smoothwall all that much so it's not a great comparison, pfSense just seems a bit more polished. It has a good feature set too.

[rustyzook]

how do you interface? putty or gui web based?

i might look into it, i only ran smooth wall for about 2 weeks, didnt really like it as i am used to ipcop.

ip cop has been dumbed down alot in the last few updates as its been made for everone so yeah alot of fetures that used to be able to set now cannot, also running the same brand and model eth cards is a PITA, so it might be time of a new os.

[Damo]

rustyzook wrote:

how do you interface? putty or gui web based?

i might look into it, i only ran smooth wall for about 2 weeks, didnt really like it as i am used to ipcop.

ip cop has been dumbed down alot in the last few updates as its been made for everone so yeah alot of fetures that used to be able to set now cannot, also running the same brand and model eth cards is a PITA, so it might be time of a new os.

It's a web interface but i'm pretty sure you can use the CLI as well. I have 2 of the exact same model cards in my pfSense box and it's working fine. I haven't messed with ipcop for years.

[rustyzook]

yeah its just the beast i know, but im going to try pfsense, it seams like a top OS just did some research! worst case im to stooped to drive it, ill just put ipcop back on!

thanks Damo!