[Knitebane]

Also, there is one good reason for which you might NOT want to use a PC as a gateway: reliability. A PC has rotating fans and hard drives that make its reliability lower than that of a full solid-state gateway. And when you gateway breaks down, you can't even look online for help!

Good point, although I've lost more power supplies than fans or hard drives.

That's why if you really care you'll install a pair of Soekris boxes. OpenBSD runs on them just fine and it ships with CARP. For about $400 a pair of load balanced, fail-over firewalls with no moving parts.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Why drop a bottle neck into the system...all I see in their products is 10/100 ethernet connections...otherwise interesting stuff....prices indicate commercial grade .

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Interesting company...

**********************

Soekris Engineering, Inc.
5400 Soquel Avenue, Suite E
Santa Cruz, CA 95062-7803
USA

Phone +1(831)464-5370, Fax +1(831)462-0946

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I was wondering what CARP was....

********************EXCERPT***********************

Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP

On most networks, the firewall is a single point of failure.

When the firewall goes down, inside users are unable to surf the web, the website goes dead to the outside world, and email grinds to a halt. Since version 3.5, OpenBSD has included a number of components which can be used to solve this problem, by placing two firewalls in parallel. All traffic passes through the primary firewall; when it fails the backup firewall assumes the identity of the primary firewall, and continues where it left off. Existing connections are preserved, and network traffic continues as if nothing had happened.