47PHA60's Journal: Firewall appliance

Received a cool kit today. It's a Lex Light System. Not mini-itx (instead of 170mm X 170mm, it is more rectangular, but same area), but it's tiny with a via chipset, via eden CPU at 533MHz, and a sleek metal case. Other stuff not found on mini-itx boards: 3 X 10/100 ethernet that can be disabled with jumpers, Compact Flash slot, and DiskOnChip socket. Also, 12V DC power in.

I ordered it from Synertron Technologies, the CA office of Bona Computech from Taiwan. Talk to Eric Lin, or send mail to [e-mail]. Just don't freak out when they say they only take checks; they're legit, and sent me my system quickly once it was in stock.

Plan: Build a firewall for home network, using 32MB diskonchip for boot, 512MB DIMM, and 512 CF for logs and the rest. Maybe I'll use a RAM disk for logs and just gpgmail 'em to myself.

The hope: quiet, low-power like a cable modem, no moving parts, and nobody in the house has to remember to turn it on to get to the Internet.

I'll post progress here as I get the rest of the parts and start to work on it. DiskOnChip 32MB module should be here tomorrow, and RAM should be here today.

The Eden CPU has a fan on it. VIA says that the 533 can run fanless, so I may remove it since I do not plan to overclock or run multimedia on the thing.