Retiring the Smoothie

After many years of firewall happiness, I finally was forced to retire my smoothwall DIY firewall. I built this box during the time when it was sexy to create a firewall from scratch using a throw away beige box. In fact, the box had been powered by the venerable AMD K5 CPU (133Mhz).. It ran flawlessly since 2000. Well why retire it now? I simply need to reduce the thermal footprint in the lab. Secondly, I realized that the squid proxy seemed to be causing me some issues. Now that I run a managed switch Linksys SRW224P and Linksys VPN/Router RV082, I didn't see the point in running two firewalls.

Oh well, I can re-deploy the box for another purpose. It was cool to drop two NICs in the box and have complete control over the behavior of the packet filtering. The box matriculated from ipchains to iptables. How sweet it was ;-)