Hardware

Hi there,

has anyone a proposal for m0n0wall compatible hardware with 6 and more ethernet interfaces? For this should be not a DSL router but a firewall in a server's environment, bandwith should be 50 MBit/s and above.

many thanks for any ideas and with best regards,

Uwe

A reasonably fast x86 PC with a pair of supported four port ethernet adapters would be a good start.

Hi,

many thanks, this solution I just thought of already but my question was going slightly another direction. Let me say: does anyone know an embedded solution with 6 or more (8 would be great too) network devices? Solutions by Soekris and ALIX have a maximum of 4 ethernet ports as far as I can see  - they are really nice but have only too few ethernet devices. Therefore I have had to engage switches that increases the number of single points of failures in my HA environment and I simply will try to avoid this scenario.

best regards, Uwe

Not sure if what I use here would meet your needs or not, and it is no longer generally available anyway. I found mine on the surplus market via ebay. They do show up from time to time though and are very reasonably priced.

It's a Global Technology Associates GB-1000 firewall appliance. Basically,  a special purpose, single board Intel Celeron 600MHz+ PC in a 1U case. There are two 40x20mm fans inside, one in the power supply, one positioned near the CPU. I found the fans too noisy so I changed them to low noise types. It runs from a CF card, or you can plug a DOM into the IDE port. It takes standard DDR RAM and has three RAM slots. These come with either one 64MB (early models) or one 128MB RAM module (later models).

The standard model has four 10/100 ethernet devices. These are distinct separate ethernet devices, not merely ports on a common device like a switch or hub. So, for m0n0wall, you could have WAN, LAN, OPT1 and OPT2 interfaces. Or you could bridge one or more ports to one of the interfaces to provide switch or hub like behavior with the appropriate rules setup.

There is one PCI expansion slot. No keyboard or video ports, it interfaces thru a 9 pin serial console port, null modem cable needed to talk to it.

I have two of these. One standard model as above, and one that came with a four port 10/100 ethernet card in the expansion slot for a total of eight 10/100 ports. The latter sounds like what you are looking for?

When seen on ebay, these run about $20-25US plus shipping.

There is one available there now in the United Kingdom, but I think it is overpriced compared to what I have paid in the past as above, and the shipping beyond the UK very expensive. See:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Global-Technology-GB-1000-System-SW-3-4-4-Firewall-/300580747234?pt=UK_Computing_Networking_SM&hash=item45fc0237e2

At least five of these have been seen on ebay since January, the most expensive was $25US plus $13US shipping within the US, not including the one above from the UK. That item has been relisted several times due to no one wanting it at that price.

wow ...

and one that came with a four port 10/100 ethernet card in the expansion slot for a total of eight 10/100 ports. The latter sounds like what you are looking for?

This is exactly what I'm looking for. Are there special requirements for the 4-port ethernet card regarding hardware and m0n0wall compatibility, execpt PCI of course?
Then I guess I have to set up a search agent on Ebay hoping one of these appliances will appear anytime. BTW shipping costs to Germany of the seller you quoted would be okay, not cheap but still quite okay.

many thanks and best regards, Uwe

The standard GB-1000 unit has four Intel 10/100 ethernet interfaces that use the fxp driver, one of the better drivers supported by m0n0wall.

The four port expansion card was a Phobos 430TX, an Intel clone that has four genuine Intel 21143TD chips on it, which uses the dc driver. It is also supported by m0n0wall.

There are four port 10/100 Intel ethernet cards floating around on ebay that should be compatible with m0n0wall.

The image to use with the GB-1000 is generic-pc-1.33.img, NOT the generic-pc-serial-1.33.img which one would think is the one to use for serial support support. Go figure.

Yes, do set up a Watch List on ebay for one of these. Of two I bid on and one a friend bid on since January, there were no other bids. We got them for between $12-25US and less than $15US shipping.

Historically, these units sold new in the early 2000s for $3K+ and the Phobos four port 10/100 card sold for over $400US.


The current 1.8 m0n0wall snapshots are not stable on the GB-1000 unit. Hopefully, the cause will be discovered and rectified.

Good luck in your searches. I sent you a personal message.