My Setup

This have been my "project" over about the past 3 years or so.  It all started with my getting high speed access for the first time.  All that power. I just had to do something with it.  So, I started looking a web servers, e-mail servers and first and foremost firewalls.  This in turn led to me becoming more familiar with Linux/Unix as an OS.

FIREWALL

Zonealarm was great as a personal firewall, but I soon found that I really needed more for what I had planned.  I searched and tested and learned as I went.  I finally settled on the L.E.A.F. Bering firewall  It had the power and the flexibility that I wanted and also a very active forum to help with the question.

I tried a number of Bering configurations: floppy based, CD-ROM based and finally settled on compactFlash based setup.  The next problem was to put all this into a piece of hardware that would be functional without being a space hog or noisy (all of this is in my study).  Soekris had just what I was looking for in its net4501 model

* 100/133 Mhz AMD ElanSC520
* 16-64 Mbyte SDRAM, soldered on board
* 1 Mbit BIOS/BOOT Flash
* CompactFLASH Type I/II socket, 8 Mbyte FLASH to 1Gbyte IBM Microdrive
* 1-3 10/100 Mbit Ethernet ports, RJ-45
* 1 Serial port, DB9. (optional 2nd serial port)
* Power LED, Activity LED, Error LED
* Mini-PCI type III socket. (t.ex for optional hardware encryption.)
* PCI Slot, right angle 3.3V only. (t.ex for optional WAN board.)
* 8 bit general purpose I/O, 14 pins header
* Hardware watchdog
* Board size 4.85" x 5.7"
* Power either 5V DC fixed or 7-20V DC, max 10 Watt
* Operating temperature 0-60 °C

Any most important.....QUIET!!

SERVERS

Ok, firewall, check.  Now the servers. I am using the Clarkconnect distro.  Again, looked at a lot of them, but the CC package had the most complete set of features and yet was not so complex that I couldn't configure it.
Initial setup was done on an old P-1 which I used to learn the system, different servers, their setup and how to add programs and modify other programs.  

For my final setup, I used a mini-itx motherboard.  It's small with more than enough power for what I want to use it for.  And, did I mention.....QUITE!  Mini-ITX.com has a lot of use info and ideas.  The actual purchase of the board....E-bay

As a finishing touch.  I put the whole thing in cigar humidor.

            Drive Setup                                             Top View                                       Side View

I am using laptop hard drives.  They are quiet and have smaller power needs.  I went from a single drive to a dual setup with RAID 1 redundancy.  I am using aluminum plates to act as both heat sinks and also to reduce the noise even more.

Costs:

As you can see most of my cost is in the hardware.  To get small and quiet it does cost.  Most of the hardware was bought off E-bay.  You can reduce your cost by going with standard desktop PCs.  You can pick them up off E-bay for under $50 each.

[email protected]