Dear Jason, On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:36:09 -0800 "Jason T. Slack-Moehrle" <slackmoehrle at 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 -- Freundliche Gruesse/Best Regards Benjamin Hackl IT/Administration Media FOCUS Research Ges.m.b.H. Maculangasse 8, 1220 Wien Austria Tel: +43 1 258 97 01-295 b.hackl at focusmr.com