My new firewall

ITauthor.com was offline all last week due to my firewall PC breaking down. I host my own web site on a machine that, seven and a half years ago, was the top-of-the-range model: Pentium II, 333 MHz, 6GB hard disk. I've given it an extra hard disk and more memory, but it's still basically a made-for-Windows-95 machine that has long since been incapable of keeping up with the resource hunger of Windows. It is, however, fine for Linux and seems to cope with Zope fairly well. My web server is on a network of its own behind a firewall. Until a week ago I was using another old PII machine (which I picked up at an auction at work for £20). It had very little memory (I'm not even sure how much) and a 2.4GB hard disk, but it was perfect for running Smoothwall.

My set up looks like this:

I have the 2 old PCs (firewall and web server) tucked away in a cupboard where they sit, ticking over, without monitors, keyboard or mice. However, the firewall machine starting making a noise so I took it out to investigate. The noise was a combination of the hard disk and a little fan on the CPU heatsink. Unfortunately the PC was obviously on its last legs because having moved it around, opened it up, poked and prodded it, something gave up and it went from not booting up Smoothwall to not booting at all. I had power but no other signs of life.

To cut a long story short, I bought a new firewall machine off eBay. £35 for a Compaq Deskpro in a little mini case with a PIII 533MHz processor, 128MB of memory and a 10GB hard disk. The price included free delivery. The only things wrong with it were a broken power switch button and a dodgey CD. The power switch wasn't an issue, you just had to take the case off to start it, but as it's going to be on 24/7, and it's set to reboot if the power fails, that's fine. The CD drive was more of a problem. Because it's massively over-specked to be a Smoothwall machine I thought I'd swap it and the web server, but the intermittant CD drive caused me hours of grief trying to install Fedora, so in the end I gave up, opted for the easy solution and just installed Smoothwall instead.

Installing Smoothwall Express is a cinch, so once I'd decided to just replace the broken machine with the new one I was back up and running in no time.

Check out Smoothwall at www.smoothwall.org.