[Gllug] Random freezes

[Ian Northeast]

Nix wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005, Jack Bertram spake:
> 
>>* Joel Bernstein <joel at fysh.org> [050124 16:39]:
>>
>>>I'd suggest you buy the smallest, cheapest second-hand PC box you can
>>>lay your hands on, install a barebones linux, secure it appropriately,
>>>and run syslogd [in network mode] on that. If you have a spare Pentium
>>>or better under the stairs gathering dust, this is the perfect use for
>>>it.
>>
> 
> I started out doing that.
> 
> Then I put a heap of daemons on it.
> 
> Then it ran the firewall.
> 
> Then because it was so cheap it died, and the rest of the local network
> screamed. :/

I did something like that, except for the "buy" bit. My firewall is a 
P150 laptop with a couple of 10Mb/s PCMCIA NICs, all scrounged from 
work, running OpenBSD. As I am a little concerned about the reliability 
of such old stuff, I have scrounged another ancient laptop and some more 
PCMCIA cards and it sits here ready to be dropped in. The only bit which 
has ever failed was one NIC, a Xircom. The NICs are now all 3Com and the 
laptops are an IBM and a Dell, so I don't anticipate much trouble.

I have no problem with running cheapo stuff as long as there's more 
cheapo stuff sitting next to it ready to take over, and someone onsite 
to switch it. I ran the firewall for our web site (we're a reasonably 
sized multinational) on a PII desktop running Devil Linux for a year. 
Not, of course, on top of a desk, in an air conditioned machine room, 
with an identical one on top of it, ready to go at the switch of few 
well labelled network cables and a floppy disk and a 2 minute reboot, 
something I was confident that even the night shift Ops could handle. 
They always had a backup copy of the floppy disk. It never did fail. It 
was more reliable than the ISP supplied and supported Nokia with 
Firewall-1 which has replaced it. *I* never made a config error:) 
Probably because both my reputation and Linux's depended on this thing 
working so I took meticulous care about changes, taking hours to make a 
5 minute change, while the ISP don't particularly care and take 5 minutes.

Regards, Ian

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