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 

and to (Pho­tos by Tim Bray)

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.