Small low-power computer for firewall
 

Can anyone give me suggestions to what I should buy for my to-be firewall/Voip gateway? I found this one:
http://www.soekris.se/shop/index.php...d&productId=11
but it's got an extremely slow cpu, and I'm worried about throughput, especially as I might want VPN and most definitely SSH tunnels. I also find it a bit expensive for the performance it gives. Are there any similar small computers that might do the task?

Oh and by the way, I prefer it to be boxed with power supply and everything.

I have used an old Pentium (yup, plain old Pentium) that I had put away because it was too old to be of "any use".
Put two NIC cards and Smoothwall on it and... works like a charm!! In fact it has been working for over 5 years (non stop) and gives me no problems.
My point is ... you do not need to buy a new machine for a firewall, just get an older machine (for almost nothing) and away you go.

Hope this helps.

Rick

Actually, this is what I have been using. I used to have an old Celeron 900 MHz box as a firewall but it was old and something on it broke (probably memory or motherboard) so now all it does is crashes. The 900 MHz box had enough power to do encryption well but I'm not sure about the 266 MHz box they had, and a Pentium is definitely too slow.

And besides, I'd like something that doesn't convert my expensive electricity to heat :)

I've put together a small wishlist of what I want for my new firewall. Does anyone know of a small computer that has the following:
* Reasonable performance (at least comparable to PIII-500). I want at least 1.5-2 MB/sec throughput.
* Have at least two network ports (or a PCI slot)
* Have the RAM required for linux with all the admin tools required (like web admin servers)
* Power-efficient, preferably with passive cooling
* Has a small casing, similar to that of the soekris.se computer
* Capable of running linux of course
* Capable of running asterisk for routing my phone calls

An 80386 can easily output 2 MB per second. Really MHz does not mean MB per second.

An Transmeta Efficeon only dissipates about 7 watts of heat on the best models. You can get the developer kit and a 5 volt, 12 volt switchmode power supply to run the board and a hard drive. I recommend using ECC memory with this setup.

Go to http://www.mini-itx.com/ to help you pick out a case for the board above or look at other mini-itx boards.