Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 10:24:11 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: david@4collections.com, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Hardware Suggestions Message-ID: <199911021824.KAA25158@pau-amma.whistle.com> In-Reply-To: <000901bf255c$a7450300$0401a8c0@4collections.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>From: "David Elliott-Liberty Collections" <david@4collections.com> >Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 13:04:02 -0500 >I've been reading about some hardware compatibility issues & was wanting >some suggestions. About to put together a bsd box to use as a firewall, web >and mail server. No workstations will be connected to it directly but about >5 will be coming through the router to remotely connect to our main server & >for mail retrieval. The web site won't be getting many hits either. Did you check out http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/hw-configs.html? >Recommendations for video & network cards as well as CPU & RAM needs. For video, I'd expect that the least expensive working card you can get: you haven't mentioned any applications that would make use of any graphics capabilities, for example. Indeed, if you could make the BIOS talk to a serial port, that would be ideal.... (My Sun background may be showing, here.) As for a network card, 10/100 bps Ethernet cards are becoming fairly reasonable. Go with a PCI card -- it's much easier to configure (i.e., it moots the point). I picked up a couple of NetGear FA310TX cards for $20 each a while back, and though I'm only using them on a 10baseT network, they've been working well. I've also had good experience (here at work) with Intel NICs that others bought for use here, but I didn't see the point of paying the premium when it came time to spending my own money. As for your proposed network topology, I confess that I would prefer to split the work between a couple of different boxen -- one to do the firewall, and one ("behind" the firewall) to do the Web service. I realize that may not be feasible in your case, but that's my preference. And I run ipfw on any exposed machine, configured to reject requests other than those I want to accept. Cheers, david -- David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com UNIX System Administrator voice: (650) 577-7158 pager: (888) 347-0197 FAX: (650) 372-5915 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199911021824.KAA25158>