Need input for making my firewall box silent/more quiet.

Satyrist

Satyrist

Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2001
Messages
724
I've been looking to make my firewall a bit more silent, or as quiet as possible...While I have been looking at the mini-itx setups from VIA, I've always been more than a bit disappointed with overall performance from VIA in the past.

I currently have this setup for my firewall:

IPCop - most current revision

Asus CUSI-M Matx board
PIII 600mhz w/passive cooling
256mb memory
Onboard SiS 10/100 - red
Intel dual-port 10/100 server nic - green, blue
15gb WD 5400 HDD
250W Antec PSU

Currently, the hard drive is perhaps the noisiest component in the machine, perhaps next followed by the PSU.

Some things I could replace for free, as I currently have them:

laptop 2.5" 30gb HDD from a thinkpad. Still works, might be a bit quieter.
Sparkle/FSP 300W PSU- Has a 120mm fan on it.

One thing I had been looking at was replacing the hard drive, and replacing it with an industrial solid state flash drive, like one of these:

http://www.mini-box.com/2GB-40-pin-Embedded-Disk-Card-4000?sc=8&category=976

I am aware that I'd need to turn off logging, and minimize the machine to be hitting the swap partition as much as possible. Might I need to increase the RAM for this setup?

The other thing that I'd like to do, is add a wireless card (preferably one Atheros based), and have the firewall control the wireless portion of my network. For this, I'd probably have an easier time moving over to pfsense or monowall, correct?

Any other suggestions? Thanks.
 
you can get quieter fans, preferably the recommended ones from silentpcreview.com and you could suspend your hard drive with elastic bands to stop the hard drive vibration noise.
 
Look into a PicoPSU (assuming your watts are low enough). No fan, silent.

Depending on how much you want to spend there is a nice passive Atom m-itx board from either MSI or GB with dual intel GiB links. It's about $180 I believe. If you're interested I can dig up a link.

If you can bump up your RAM you can probably load your OS off a read-only partition on the flash drive - should run much faster. Rather than turning your logs off look into network based logging (syslog-ng should work if you run another linux/unix box).

What case are you running in, what fans are you running, etc...
 
Welp, one more try because the database ate my post from yesterday.

I do see some inexpensive CF -> IDE adapters on Monoprice, I'll probably pick one up.

So far as CF cards go, any particular suggestions if it makes a particular difference which brand I happened to pick up? 512mb-1gb is probably plenty for PFSense, I figure.

I did find a motherboard that I had hidden away someplace, it's a bit of an oddity.

Abit TS-20 Matx motherboard
Celeron 333a CPU
256mb memory
onboard video
onboard intel 10/100 nic x 2
1 pci slot -- will probably put a wifi card here

So far as a case, I do have a microfly that I'm not doing anything else with, I'll probably use a 5/7v 120mm fan for intake, and let the sparkle PSU handle exhaust.

So far as power consumption, what is the average consumption for a CF card? A 802.11G based wifi card?

It does appear that calculations I have found with online calculators bring the wattage consumed to around 110-120 watts, unsure if this might be a bit high or not though.

If it is correct, I'd probably need to get 150w if going pico itx psu.
 
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