Phil Shrimpton wrote:
Hi,
I am going to buy a cheap Second hand PC to run my firewall with my cable modem, what is the main 'feature' I should concentrate on, RAM, processor speed or disk speed? I won't be running X or anything, just the firewall stuff.
What else will the machine be doing? My firewall does firewall,sendmail,leafnode,masquerade and dns. It's running on a pentium/100 with 32meg of ram. The machine isn't being stressed out at all. It's actually barely running. My suggestion find a windows user who is getting a new machine. Likely his old machine is overkill for what you need. Likely the most you will want to do is swap out the HD for something bigger. But if you aren't running a local newserver even that isn't an issue. One thing check the bios. Older bios won't handle the new large HDs. Considering how hard it's getting to even find a smaller HD today that might be an issue. One reason I've always liked Asus is they keep providing bios updates forever. My firewall machine got a bios update this year. Thats for a system based on Asus's first pentium 90/100 MB. HX chipset? Nick -- Nick Zentena "The Linux issue," Wladawsky-Berger explained, "is whether this is a fundamentally disruptive technology, like the microprocessor and the Internet? We're betting that it is." -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/