Ook Firewall Upgrade

[The_Unbeliever]

Heyup

My firewall's an ancient 266MHz P2 with 64Mb RAM and a 10Gb IDE HDD.

But it does the job quite well with Smoothwall and a couple of mods

But now I want to look at upgrading the hardware from its current incarnation to something... more beefier which will support virtualization.

The idea is to install Proxmox hypervisor first, and then installing Smoothwall etc as virtual machines.

Which motherboard will be the best? A 32-bit or 64-bit board? Somehow I think a 32-bit one will be the best as I'm only going to run 32-bit software.

As the Year 2038 problem is 26 years or so in future, I'm not gonna worry about that for now, by the time 2038 rolls round, I'll have new 64-bit (or 128-bit) hardware...

8Gb RAM should be more than enough for a Smoothie and one or two client images - more than that I'm not going to run.

And, of course, 2x 500Gb HDD's for a mirroring solution... More than that storage I'm definitely not going to need. (and I sincerely hope my words doesn't come back and haunt me )

Any other recommendations?

 

[RoganDawes]

When all you have is a microserver, everything looooks like a solution

 

[DominionZA]

I upgraded my firewall this weekend. From a GX280 to a HP Microserver. All I added to the MS was a second nic and a DVD drive. Works like a bomb!

 

[HavocXphere]

tbh The RAM strikes me as an overkill while the HDD seems too thin. But I can see how thats a matter of perspective & intended use here. Knowing you it'll probably not have a GUI installed, so you can prob cram a bazzillion VMs into even 4gb though.

Not sure how the hypervisor handles these things, but are you sure the 8gb vs 32bit thing will work out?

 

[The_Unbeliever]

tbh The RAM strikes me as an overkill while the HDD seems too thin. But I can see how thats a matter of perspective & intended use here. Knowing you it'll probably not have a GUI installed, so you can prob cram a bazzillion VMs into even 4gb though.

Not sure how the hypervisor handles these things, but are you sure the 8gb vs 32bit thing will work out?

This is the point of this thread.

Now that you've mentioned it...

Would a 4Gb/32-bit system be better suited? Or 8Gb/64-bit? I can get away with 4gb for now ( but was thinking that 8gb should be better...)

HDD might be a bit lean, true. But I can leave an upgrade path open by ensuring that I'll be able to pull one 500Gb hdd, replace it with a 1Tb (or whatever) and have the system rebuild it, then pull the other 500Gb, and replace that with a 1Tb, then, after the final rebuild, resize the partition to use the bigger HDD's.

Or, simpler and better, just add both 1Tb's as another mirrored volume & extend the volume onto these...

 

[HavocXphere]

Now that you've mentioned it...

Would a 4Gb/32-bit system be better suited? Or 8Gb/64-bit? I can get away with 4gb for now ( but was thinking that 8gb should be better...)

I dunno how the hypervisor copes with these things tbh. The hyper *has* to be 64bit since its >4GB...but I think you can *prob* run a 32bit guest...but support for the mix & match approach seems a bit patchy with most VM types stuff.

I'd go for everything 64bit since the hyper has to be 64bit & I don't like the mix & match thing.

Its not so much a question of better suited...but rather what is needed vs budget. Presumably the budget diff will be small so 8gb/64bit I reckon. I don't really see you using it fully for the given usage scenario, but what the hell why not.

HDD might be a bit lean, true. But I can leave an upgrade path open by ensuring that I'll be able to pull one 500Gb hdd, replace it with a 1Tb (or whatever) and have the system rebuild it, then pull the other 500Gb, and replace that with a 1Tb, then, after the final rebuild, resize the partition to use the bigger HDD's.

Its totally dependent on the intended use. I rate buy whatever you think will guarantee that you don't need to do an upgrade on the HDDs. The entire upgrade path thing doesn't make sense given the price gap to 1tb or 1.5tb even. With the proposed upgrade path you'll essentially be spending +- double in total if you crunch the numbers. Works out to about 500 extra now vs 1.3k extra via upgrade path. (932-682)*2 & (932-(932-682))*2 using PCint assuming 7200 drives.

Largely comes down to whether you'll be storing media on it or not imo. Depending on that you either need 2tb+ drives or <500gb...