The Tekblog

I have always been a fan of network appliances; that is, a purpose-built computer made to be a device of some sort on your network. While most of the home-brew appliances are not very well advised to be used in production, I still enjoy building something I may be able to use in my lab. I dont know if it is the form-factor that is appealing or the fact that they are typically built on some flavor of  Linux; I guess its a geek thing either way.

I have had a PIA Micro-ATX case that I picked up some time ago (6+ years) when I was going to do a mini-watercooled PC back when I was more into hardware. I think I got this case for something like $40 off of Pricewatch. Once I actually laid eyes on the case, I thought it would be a great little Smoothwall, so I proceeded to scrounge up some parts. What I ended up using was an old Asus P2B Motherboard with a blazing fast Celeron 266 and 64MB of RAM. This thing ran the Smoothwall platform and was my home gateway firewall for about 4 years. I had it sitting on my desk with a cash-register monitor and it Tailed /var/log/messages and then piped it through ColorLogs which gave me a nice looking techie display of realtime logging information. I thought that was the coolest thing for years but then the motherboard died and it sat on my shelf for 2 years. I always knew I was going to resurrect it and give it new life doing something cool!

Recently I had some time to sit down and rebuild this computer. The hardware is still lack-luster running an Athalon XP 1800+ w/ 512MB. This should be just fine for an Untangle Appliance. I went ahead and took some photographs of the build in case anyone was interested: Check out my WebAlbums: http://picasaweb.google.com/Teklogic757/PIAMicroATXUntangleAppliance