Not that this is all that pertinent to today's hardware/distros, but...Many years ago I used a really early version of Fedora (manually configured iptables) on a 486 class PC with, at most, 512MB of RAM.If I recall I was on a synchronous 128Kbit connection before broadband was available in this community.The distro I used actually fit on a floppy, so after bootstrapping from the floppy to RAMfs, I popped it out.Uptime for that before retiring it was well over 1000 days. I also tried Untangle, and Nitix, and some other ones which have been lost to the dustbin of my memory. Today I use the relatively inexpensive Ubiquity EdgeRouter Pro with 8 independently configurable interfaces - rack mountable, small footprint, robust, easy to configure, and high throughput. It has some nice observability tools built-in (I can watch my Comcast connection go out and come back), and after putting the Comcast modem in bridge mode, my EdgeRouter is "on the Internet" so it can be a secure endpoint for me to VPN back into my LAN. All with very little configuration. I certainly hear you about reusing old hardware. I was there but aging like I have, I tend to donate the old hardware and purchase fit-for- purpose equipment for my use cases. Let us know what you end up setting up. On Fri, 2020-04-17 at 08:51 -0500, Brian Wall wrote: > Hi all, > I have an older piece of gear with an Intel Core2 proc, 2 gigs of > RAM, and a multitude of interfaces. I've been wanting to turn this > into a firewall appliance. > > I'm wanting to use 5 or 6 different interfaces (LAN, WAN, DMZ, Guest > WIFI, IoT, Lab). I'm finding that the old standbys, IPcop and its > sort of replacement IPfire don't handle that number of interfaces and > all the filtering I want. > > I've played with pfSense, and it's OK, but limited in its feature > set. I really like Untangle, but it insistently demands 6GB of RAM > and not 1MB less. This box is finicky enough that I don't really > have the desire to find enough RAM and make the box happy about it. > > So.. What else is out there that people like? Do people still roll > their own with iptables, pf, or whatever the latest thing is? > > Yes, I suppose I could replace the box, but it's a 1U appliance and > designed for this kind of thing. > > I'm open to suggestions. > > Thanks, > Brian > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________TCLUG Mailing List - > Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesotatclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20200417/af342856/attachment.htm>