Compaq Armada M700 as pfsense box.

[TGA]

Hey all I just finished up running cat6 through a friend’s house and now he is ready for some new hardware to manage his network.

I have a Compaq Armada M700 with a 650MHz PIII and 256mb of ram. Device Manager list the built in NIC as an Intel PRO/100+. So I was thinking I could pick up an Intel PCMCIA NIC off ebay and load pfsence on it. Other than a loud CD drive the laptop seems to be in great condition. So even though it’s old I don’t really have any huge reliability concerns. Not really sure how power efficient it will be but at least it has its own battery backup.

I know some of you are or at least have in the past run pfsence from a laptop. So before I buy a nic for this laptop I thought I would ask if this would be a good setup or not? Should I also look for some more ram on ebay?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It'll run on that fine with default components of PFSense.

Wow...that model Armada....those were nice biz laptops back in the day.

I haven't run PFSense on an Armada...but those were good laptops, solid Intel components, so it should run fine.

 

[TGA]

Cool, I got the impression that it had plenty of power for his small network.

And yeah I don’t remember how I acquired this Armada but it’s been a great little laptop and I will miss it to some extent. I often use it over the other laptops I got laying around just because it has a trackpoint rather than a touch pad. Though at this point the trackpoint is in very bad shape and the buttons have to be pressed rather hard. Yeah I need a new thinkpad.

Anyway here is a link to the other nic I just ordered for it. Hopefully I don’t have any problems with it. I don’t have much experience with these old laptop expansion cards


http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Intel-Pro-1...tem&pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2c527507b7

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I haven't used that particular NIC with my PFSense installs...but I'd probably wager it should work, Intel seems to be quite widely supported..and preferred.