[PLUG] Brighter plans: energy efficient, reliable firewall hardware

[CJ Fearnley <cjf@LinuxForce.net>]

On a brighter note, I started thinking (again) today about replacing my
home office's firewall with a new energy efficient box.

I'd want to put Nagios and bind9 on it, so it's more than just a
firewall. I'd put Debian 9.0 (Stretch) on it.

SSDs make sense for energy efficiency. Probably raid-1 for reliability.
Probably less than 20GB of storage is needed (no X11).

I have two ISPs, so I'd need 3 Ethernet ports.

64-bit to avoid the 2038 bug makes sense: I don't plan to reinstall the
system before 2038 (Debian is infinitely upgradeable!), so I wouldn't
want that deadline hanging over my head (I'm on a tear to get rid of
32-bit hardware from my life: better now than in 2037!!!). I suppose I
might replace the box by moving the SSDs into a more energy efficient
container in 10 years. But to avoid reformatting the disks, it would
need to be 64-bit from the start, no?

Is there cheap, energy efficient Linux-capable hardware with a small
footprint for this kind of application? What would you recommend?

-- 
CJ Fearnley                 |   LinuxForce Inc.
cjf@LinuxForce.net          |   IT Projects & Systems Maintenance
http://www.LinuxForce.net   |   http://blog.remoteresponder.net
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