On 12/14/16 20:39, Aaron Mason wrote: > All > > I'm looking for a 1U appliance that I can re-purpose into a firewall > using OpenBSD. I've tried the near-free method by using an old Lacie > Ethernet Disk appliance I had lying around, but it turns out the > onboard SATA chipset is toast on this particular unit (it freezes at > CDBOOT when it detects hard drives and the BIOS freezes when I set it > to IDE mode with drives attached, plus it only has one onboard NIC and > one PCI slot, so I can't install another SATA card without removing > the other NIC I installed), so I'm looking for other options that fit > a limited budget.
heh. Little secret: if you look in many data centers, you will find lots of 1U boxes with various titles -- security appliances, load balancing devices, etc. A lot of them, under the covers, are just PCs. And a lot of data centers have 'em rotting on the racks after they have been turned off and replaced, but no motivation to remove them. Just cleaned out some stuff from one of our data centers -- we had a three authentication devices and a couple "security appliances" that all turned out to have the same SuperMicro board on them...some with Pentium D, others with P4s...but both could pump a lot of packets through gigabit NICs (two on board). The security appliances were kinda cool in that they have a LCD screen that looks like it could be accessed through a USB serial port (better yet, when you powered up the box, the LCD panel put up an advertisement, not for the security appliance maker, but for the LCD panel...including a website. Bet there are docs there! :) (I once programmed the LCD panel of a Novell server to say, "WINDOWS SUCKS". Wasn't noticed for years, but when it was, my name was quickly assumed as being responsible) We also had a couple odd little "load balancers" -- five NIC ports. My coworkers were skeptical about it being a standard PC under the cover. Haven't tried to boot OpenBSD on them yet, but turns out the thing has a 128M SATA DiskOnModule (flash memory on a SATA board), a 1G CF card, and a SATA hard disk in the box. Again, all in one U. And I'll admit there's a certain fun in bringing up another OS on something like that. And I HAVE to at least try to bring up OpenBSD on them...so I can wipe the media before the hw is disposed of. (Company policy says "overwrite entire disk with random data", who's got the fastest random number generator in town? OpenBSD, of course!) Nick.
