This is for my home, I know it's overkill for m0n0wall, but you can 
never have too many extra servers around :)
Not to mention that I'm planning on upgrading my network to gigabit 
soon, and this thing will be connecting two separate subnets, so I need 
something that won't slow things down in between.

Anyway, would sata be the only point of concern? If that's the case, 
then I could just as easily swap the drives when I get this and put in a 
regular ATA. I'm more concerned about the onboard nic, cause that I 
can't replace and I have to be sure that it will be recognized by 
m0n0wall and also be able to run in full-duplex gigabit mode. That's the 
most important part.

Also on that note, say I have my main subnet connected to the onboard 
gigabit nic, my WAN (Cable modem) to a PCI nic, and my DMZ to a 2nd PCI 
gigabit card. Now as far as I know PCI can do gigabit, but just barely 
(32/8*33.3*1,000,000/1,048,576=127.2 MBytes/second, right?). So what 
happens to my internet connection if I have a lot of traffic between the 
LAN and DMZ? That'll be pretty much taking up most of the PCI bandwidth, 
will it not? So when in the middle of this I have other computers who 
need to get to the outside, will they experience any slowdowns? Just 
haven't ever experimented with things like this. I would very much like 
to separate a few computers (mainly my servers) from the main network, 
but if the traffic between my file server and my workstations will cause 
problems, then I may have to come up with an alternate solution and take 
the m0n0wall out of the loop - just use it as my gateway between LAN and 
WAN. The SC420 actually has one PCIe 1x slot and an 8x slot, but I don't 
think there are any PCIe NICs out there...

Any tips appreciated on this.


Bryan Kohlstedt wrote:

>You could probably get it working although you might have to recompile
>with the necessary drivers as I doubt that support for sata etc would
>be built in.
>
>By the way, this is serious overkill. Is this for business or home? I
>personally would just get a WRAP board for less money and it would use
>less power and you'd be giving up very little.  Just a thought.
>
>Bryan
>
>
>On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 17:19:34 -0500, Max Khitrov <mkhitrov at umd dot edu> wrote:
>  
>
>>Hi everyone, I'm thinking about getting the dell SC420 server (just the
>>most basic config) for use as my firewall. Later I'm thinking about
>>actually setting up my own OpenBSD solution on it, but that won't happen
>>till the summer when I have some free time. Until then, I wanted to ask
>>if anyone else has experience running m0n0wall on the SC420 and if it
>>was compatible in terms of the onboard nic, sata hard drive, etc...
>>
>>Please let me know.
>>Thanks.
>>
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