HardwareBanter - View Single Post

December 2nd 05, 12:32 AM posted to alt.sys.pc-clone.compaq.servers

In article . com,
says...
Are you planning to build a firewall from scratch? Perhaps using Debian
as a base? Or do you plan to use a package like IPCOP? I am curious
about the ability of either to handle Array Mirroring. I know that
IPCOP has SCSI support (unlike my good buddy Smoothwall), but I believe
it is limited to supporting a single SCSI hard disk. Also, for a
firewall, your two 9.1G drives will be an overkill...a single 4.3G
drive will be more than sufficient.

Jeff

What I normally do is install Gentoo from a Stage 1 tarball, and add
Shorewall if I'm building a firewall only machine. The reasons I like
the Proliants so much is that they're dirt cheap, built like a tank, do
internet-related stuff just brilliantly, and they have all (until now
that is) come with array controllers so I can set up RAID in hardware.

For this machine I was intending to just have RAID 0 going so it at
least had some form of redundancy, and it came with four 9.1GB drives,
so I figured hey pull out two, don't worry about an off-line spare, and
just run the two drives as a mirror. I was told it had an array
controller when I bought it, so I made the assumption.

I got a bit sus when I couldn't find any nodes under /dev/ida/c0 or
/dev/ida/disk0 and then found /dev/sda. Oh well.

Rather than muck around finding and installing a spare array controller
(hey the whole machine with four drives only cost AUD36 so I ain't going
to bother adding a card) I'll just use a single drive, and if it falls
over one day then so be it.

So what I normally do is, install Gentoo, utility bits and pieces, X,
webmin, shorewall, firefox. That way it's more user-friendly for the guy
who's going to be running the network off it.