Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Mark Weaver wrote:
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On Tue, 1 Jan 2008 08:57:22 -0500 Robert Moskowitz rgm@htt-consult.com wrote:
Have you ever thought about how rare floppy drives are now? At best you go with a bootable usb, if your notebook supports bootable USB. My Libretto does have a bootable floppy, but that is something extra to carry. It will not boot from anything else (besides its HD). My nc4010 (this notebook) will boot from usb. My corp notebook (nc2400) is locked down; and I don't see any value at getting corp IT bent out of shape.
why would you even think about using a Notebook computer as a firewall? I was assuming you were going to delegate this task to an older machine with sufficient resources to handle the task and not give the task to a notebook computer.
I guess he wants it to be portable.
He seems to be knowing his requirements a lot better than we do. It looks like he wants an easy firewall that would boot for HD only, cost nothing, and runs with usb ethernet devices.
I really think he should carry an embedded firewall (like a soekris or a wrap) with pfsense on it.
Old laptops make pretty good firewalls, I think. They take little space, have a built-in battery backup and built-in keyboard/monitor to use when you are visiting the datacenter. I have repurposed a couple of older laptops for these reasons since the machine doesn't need to be very fast to accomplish the mission. A lot of 3-4 year old laptops cave in under the weight of Windows, but are really overkill for a simple unix firewall. Better than sending them to the dustbin.
Best,