Small machine for network use

[Factorial8]

I'm looking for a small or very small PC (or two) to do duty as LAN firewall or similar. In these days of low-powered CPUs like Atoms there ought to be lots of options, but I can't find a single one.

I see lots of media servers and the like, with fancy graphics and sound, but I just want plain old VGA and I don't need sound at all. I need at least two Ethernet ports.

Can anyone point me to a suitable device?

--
Peter.

[nelz]

How about a Raspberry Pi with a USB ethernet adaptor? You don't get much smaller or lower powered than that?

[Factorial8]

I thought of that, and it seems to me that all sorts of people ought to have solved my problem using Pis. I don't want to fiddle about putting bits into boxes though - is anyone selling systems ready to go? And how many USB Ethernet adapters could I connect?

Thanks for the idea.

[nelz]

With a hub, you can fit multiple adaptors, but I suspect you'd soon run into bandwidth issues. There are Mini-ITX boards with multiple network ports, ideal for this sort of task. Have a look at http://mini-itx.com and http://linitx.com, maybe something like this.

[Dutch_Master]

It helps not to put punctuation directly after a link
http://linitx.com/

[nelz]

Yes, phpBB isn't very clever like that.

[purplepenguin]

If you want a firewall. There is an IPFire image for the PI.

http://wiki.ipfire.org/en/hardware/arm/rpi

If you want a Atom powered machine. Have you looked at netbooks on ebay.They are rather cheap now. I bought one with 2GB ram, Atom cpu and 8gb SSD for £30 inc p&p.

[Nuke]

Two points.

1) Don't most routers already have a firewall built in, optionally?

2) Would a RPi be slow? I know its processor is 700 MHz, which should be OK, but I wonder about its connection hardware, being done to a low price. I am interested as I am currently setting up a RPi as part of a home-made NAS (only for serving text files and other sedentary stuff, not media).

[Factorial8]

Yes, and both my ADSL router and my WAP do have firewalls. The WAP is OK but the router has two snags: its logging leaves much to be desired, and even though it has four Ethernet ports they all have to be on the same network segment. I was hoping to find a device to let me split off a segment for an Internet-facing server in a DMZ.

Thanks also to purplepenguin for the nettop suggestion. I'll look into it.

--
Rgds
Peter.