Dear Jason,
On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:36:09 -0800 "Jason T. Slack-Moehrle" slackmoehrle@gmail.com wrote:
How does one determine the specs for a firewall?
Depends on your requirements. If you just want some port filtering/forwarding it can be done by low power Atom machines or even some old hardware (Pentium 2 possibly even older). ARM, MIPS are also fine but check if your software/OS runs on that very special architecture. If it is a mission critical firewall I'd recommend buying new hardware instead of reusing your ten year old Pentium 3. If you need new memory it's often cheaper to buy 8 GB of RAM instead of 1, 2 or 4GB nowadays.
Don't skimp on network adapters! 10$ adapters are usually not built for 24/7 usage.
If you want to do deep packet inspection, (i.e. antispam, antivirus, etc.) you should invest in decent (!) hardware.
If you'd like to access your firewall remotely you should consider a remote management card like ILO, DRAC.
UPS, diesel motor, failover cluster, how much money do you have? ;-)
Brgds