For a home network a few megabits of Internet connectivity, anything modern would be overkill, especially as you already have a dedicated switch and wireless AP. If you're just building a one-off personal machine and want to save a few bucks, there's nothing wrong with buying one of the "end of life" Net4801's (check eBay).
I've been building firewalls with OpenBSD for many years, but am just getting started this year with Soekris, and found http://wiki.soekris.info to be a good resource for Soekris-specific questions, and http://www.daemonforums.org/ for firewall and networking questions for any Unix-like OS. And if you do decide to go with OpenBSD, there are several good print books on the subject. For my personal deployment (and for my F500 employer), I decided to go with an embedded platform after several machines failed solely due to "moving parts". I justified a Net5501 as my latest 'home' firewall because that's the platform we're deploying on a large scale for work, and I can make good use of the extra capacity by running more than just a packet filter, for example, running Squid (caching to RAM only, not to disk) directly on the firewall. Kevin _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
