Mini atx for firewall

[J. Seth Henry]

Guys,
Case Outlet*, and perhaps others by now, have the Travla Flex ATX / mini ITX 
case that will accomodate two PCI cards. I have an 933MHz EPIA board with two 
3c905TX-C NICs, and have seen a substantial improvement in performance over 
my old Netgear router. 

Trust me, the onboard NIC's are crap. If you are building a firewall/router - 
get real NIC's. On the other hand, most cable modems are band limited by the 
cable company to about 1.5 to 2Mbps, so a USB ethernet device might not be a 
serious limitation - but I would definitely suggest a good NIC for the LAN 
side. I've had problems with the rl device on my ITX board "locking up"

Regards,
Seth Henry

*I've done business with them before, and they seem to have fair prices, and 
decent configurations - but other than that, I don't have any relations with 
them.

On Wednesday 19 November 2003 15:00, freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org 
wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 04:11:46PM +0100, Nico Meijer wrote:
> > Hi Francisco,
> >
> > >Anyone used a mini ATX machine with FreeBSD?
> >
> > It's mini ITX and yes, just did one yesterday. Small, quiet and
> > beautiful. ;-)
> >
> > It was a ME6000 (fanless 600Mhz machine):
> > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=794445+0+/usr/local/www/db/te
> >xt/2003/freebsd-questions/20030928.freebsd-questions
> >
> > >My primary concern is the network card. Since these small machines only
> > >have one PCI slot I will add one card for the internal network and then
> > >would need the onboard card to connect to the outside world.
> >
> > I tried a 3com 3c905 with this box and it wouldn't boot. Putting in a
> > RTL8139 worked flawlessly. Since the box won't be doing any 'real' work,
> > that's okay with me for now.
> >
> > HTH... Nico
>
> I'm using a USB Ethernet adapter for the 'outside' interface on my ME6000,
> since I needed the PCI slot for the wireless card.  Seems to work just
> fine - it's only talking to a cable modem so the fact that the USB
> connection only runs at 11Mbps is not a problem.  Just another option to
> consider.