Saving some money on the electricity bill is always a good thing – but how do you do it without limiting yourself in your nerdy life?
One answer might be to get a Soekris 5501 and use it as a gateway.
I’ve just received two of those nice boxes (had a 4801 before, but had to replace it with an Atom based system, due to lack of throughput).
Since I’ve got two 5501s now, It’s the perfect opportunity to play with different software solutions (can always keep one system ready to run, when the other blows up :P).
The points I wanted the new gateway system to be able to do:
– act as IPv6 endpoint for my sixxs.net tunnel
– wake up my homeserver and workstation via WOL
– act as a VPN gateway
– be easy to use 🙂
There’s more or less possibilities to look at here:
pfsense
m0n0wall
build-your-own system
M0n0wall and pfsense both are quite nice systems – but none of them is perfekt :-/
– pfsense lacks the option to terminate an IPv6 tunnel
– m0n0wall lacks L2TP/IPsec VPN
Since I’m a huge fan of IPv6 I had to go with m0n0wall in the beginning, but when I receive the HDD kit I’ve ordered I’ll start building my own debian based gateway (the Atom system is Ubuntu). The reason for not building the system right now on a CF card is simple: CF isn’t made for repeatedly write operations.
Getting a HDD into my firewall and using a normal debian gives some new opportunities to graph my ups, and just use it as a small webserver.