FennecBlog

To my eternal shame, I have started microblogging. You can follow it (if you wish), at MicroFennec.

In other news, I have pulled the Atom 330 out of my desktop and put it into my fileserver, and repurposed the VIA C7-D into a hardware firewall. Both seem happy enough now, the C7-D performing WAN->LAN tranfers at 5.99MB/s with 30% CPU load.

Having had a look at the Atom D510 boards, however, I plan on upgrading soonish. Approximately £150 for two boards. 1.66GHz, dual-core, hyperthreaded, and a much lower TDP than the Atom 330 platform thanks to the use of the NM10 chipset (2.5W TDP) rather than the GMA950 chipser (22W TDP). Results in a 15W platform TDP for the Atom D510 compared to 30W for the 330.

Probably going to stop using Smoothwall on the router when that happens, and switch to Ubuntu Server, as Smoothwall currently lacks both dual-core and hyperthreading support. I’ll be sad to see the ease-of-use vanish, but the power gained by being able to edit configuration files by hand will hopefully make up for it. I’ve already started planning on what I’m going to put on it, though:

• Shorewall.
• PPtPd.
• DNSmasq.
• linux-igd.
• openssh-server.

And that’s about it. Shorewall will give me a good high-level interface to iptables, PPtPd will give me a simple ‘proper’ VPN solution over NeoRouter (though I might keep on using that too.). DNSmasq for a very simple, combination DNS and DHCP server. I don’t need BIND or DHCPD for my network. Linux-igd will give upnp using clients the ability to traverse the NAT without problems, and openssh-server will give me a line into the firewall to perform updates and maintenence, as it’ll be running headless and keyboardless.