Help me spec a rig for smoothwall

[BandofBrothers]

Hi guys

Long story short, my router sucks, I cannot use torrents properly, and majestic 12 keeps crapping out all the time, due to the router.

Its a linksys wrt54gs, and I have tried dd-wrt firmware, and many others, and its still not good.

I want to buy\build a cheap pc to run 24\7 with smoothwall installed, to act as a proper hardware firewall, and so I have NO issues with lots of incoming connections and data transfer etc.

Is this the kind of spec I should look for?

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/DELL-OPTIPLEX-GX110-PIII-933-256-MB-10GB-Desktop-PC_W0QQitemZ260046241628QQihZ016QQcategoryZ179QQrd Z1QQcmdZViewItem#ebayphotohosting

Also, will I need some cheap pci lan cards? (theres only going to be 2-3 pc's connected to the network)

Will that be enough processing power + ram for hundreds of connections for Majestic 12 etc?

Thanks for any help you can offer:toast: :toast:

[Mc Intosh]

I could get much better results if my router could keep up...

If someone could explain to me in very simple terms how to get this smoothwall up&running I would be very gratefull :D

[[XC] moddolicous]

There are two people on this forum that got smoothwalls up and running: Bloody Sorcerer and Hixie. That rig you posted if fine as, but more ram couldnt hurt if you wanted to run some of the extra installs (dansgaurdian, proxy, etc). Depending on what you need, that will be how many PCI cards you need. How do you connect to the internet? The minimum will be two (cable from your modem (red), cable to your switch(green)). If you want to make an FTP server, that will be another card (orange). And if you want to turn your old linksys wrt54gs into an access point only, thats another (blue). So anywhere between 2-4 cards. Make sure you read the install docs a couple of times. Hope this helps.

[hixie]

Band of brothers, that dell is a perfect choice for a smoothie or IPCOP rig, infact that was what i was using, til i upgraded to a P4 IPCOP.
I definatly like IPCOP over smoothwall, mostly because of QoS and an extra wireless option (blue).

[BandofBrothers]

ohh, I have found an even nicer machine for the task

a 1ghz pIII xeon with a 40gb hdd, and some spare pci slots for additional network cards (only thing is, it only has 128mb pc133 ram, but I am going to see if I can scrounge some additional ram)

Might grab the machine off ebay, as it is £50 delivered (I could sell my router for about £40 ish):toast: :banana:

[Bloody_Sorcerer]

insanely overkill :)
my P2-300 w/ 192 megs of ram (PC-66 perhaps? not really sure) with 2 PCI NICs works flawlessly with still plenty of capacity for... uh... anything :cool:
just make sure you've also got a switch to throw on the LAN side of things ;)
also, non-identical NICs will make it easier to identify which is which, and check driver compatability on NICs you plan to use; it was a deciding factor for me between smoothwall and IPCOP (smoothwall had drivers for both cards, IPCOP didn't).

once you smoothie, you never go back :)

hardware requirements are so pathetically low that if you do get that 1 ghz P3 xeon, i'd reccomend underclocking it/undervolting it if possible to save on power bills. also, pull any unneeded hardware. once its installed, all you need is the board, cards, cpu, mem, storage, and PSU. floppies and CD drives should be gone to save power, and no IO is needed beyond 2 network cords and a power cord :)

[nn_step]

That'll work, unless you would go for an uber over kill :D

[Frisch]

You're going to knock the million down today, isn't the first million sweet.....
But, you want more after that, it's called greed....just look at movieman, he's gone berserk...

The story goes like this

First the first....YEHA
Then the second....Weeeeeeeeeeeeeee
What about the third...nah
It's the fifth that does it...

Soon he'll chase PY 222..... :)

But congratulation on your first million (in advance)

[WesM63]

The last time i was going to build a Smoothwall rig, i had a P2 400, 256mb ram and 3x3Com905b nics. Which was more than suffiecnt.

[BandofBrothers]

hmm in that case, I might ask around locally and see if anyone has an old p1\p2 rig they want shut of, and take it off their hands for free\10 quid etc:toast:

[hixie]

My P3 wasn't able to handle all the connections, QoS and all the other crap i was giving it. So i upgraded my IPCOP to a Socket 478 1.7Ghz Willamette which was overkill, CPU usage never goes above 15% now.