Anyway

One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while was move the firewall/router and minor web sites served from an old Pen­tium 3 in the base­ment to a more mod­ern solu­tion. I’ve blogged some of the jour­ney, start­ing with the motiv­a­tion and mov­ing through the todo list. Yes­ter­day was the day for the big switch.

After a couple of hours twid­dling this and that, get­ting rid of spare cables, and vacu­um­ing the backs of com­puters that sel­dom get this treat­ment, we now have a hard­ware firewall/router and some minor web sites powered by a Sun Ultra 20 OpenSol­aris, rather than rely­ing on an old Pen­tium 3 doing all of that. It’s amaz­ing how much faster the minor sites load on a sys­tem with a decent amount of memory!

In other words, we’ve now gone from

old fire­wall + web­site server

wires

new web­site server

I still have to set up ddcli­ent or some­thing sim­ilar to inform DynDNS when our IP address changes, and there are some oddit­ies, such as the Sol­aris box not broad­cast­ing its host­name to the router which I want to track down. For some reason the Sol­aris box didn’t start the Eth­er­net con­nec­tion prop­erly on reboot, but I don’t yet know whether that was a ran­dom occur­rence or some­thing that I have to pay atten­tion to. Still, things are work­ing, at least until our next power out­age. Whether it works past that depends on whether the router moves around the IP addresses it assigns, which would mean the IP-based for­ward­ing not for­ward­ing to the right place. I may end up installing dd wrt or some­thing sim­ilar on the fire­wall (although it appears the par­tic­u­lar one I have doesn’t sup­port dd wrt itself), but for the time being I’m run­ning the ori­ginal soft­ware and it seems to do the job.