Hello everyone, sorry I have been away for so long. Holiday plus vacation took a little bit out of me. Hopefully I will be back strong this year and write up a bunch of articles that someone will get something out of. Here we go.
At work one of my upcoming projects will be testing the embedded hardware from ALIX to build a firewall that is as capable as a Cisco PIX 506E and then some for under $300. The hardware I am speaking of actually needs to be assembled which is kinda cool and all in all is the size of a Cisco PIX 501 which is in the neighborhood of 6″x6″. Not too shabby huh.
Here’s the parts list stolen from the pfSense blog:
ALIX Board
Black Case
2GB CF Card
Power Supply
Wireless Card
Pigtail
Antenna
The CF card, wireless card, pigtail and antenna might be sourced elsewhere if I can find good deals however for the power supply, ALIX board and case I will be using Netgate. Total cost for the item’s mentioned at time of this writing is $235.50 plus tax and shipping.
As you can see the embedded hardware will have 3 10/100 NIC’s and an 802.11a/b/g wireless card which when pared with pfSense would make an excellent branch office or home router/firewall/IDS/wireless device.
I’ll let you know my progress as it begins to unfold, it shouldn’t take me long after I receive all the parts.