Slashdot Mirror

emBSD does it better in IIRC under 32MB

emBSD has been around for a while, and is built on OpenBSD too. -Yes, it's targeted towards firewalls, but can be used for more.

There's a few mini-BSDs out there. PicoBSD and ClosedBSD are based on FreeBSD. EmBSD is based on OpenBSD.

...I think the idea is to use the smallest, dumbest hardware available, and that all the "use old PC posts" are way off the mark.

I'd look at something like the embsd.org board (mentioned previously) rather than go with old PCs. Remember, the guy specifically mentions looking at Embedded Linux and finding it too much of a hassle, so I guess he doesn't want an old PC. He just wants a _simpler_ embsd board...

Mod me up, please. I forgot my password!

That is pretty tiny. You might check out the guys over at embsd.org, specifically this thing. Out of the box you could do NAT and Firewall with it I'm sure... I'd imagine Syslog (with a disk of some sort) and SNMP too. Only question is whether or not the cpu has enough grunt for IDS... Also, and this is a more expensive solution, you might consider getting one of the Cappucino mini-PCs over at thinkgeek. They'll set you back 800-1100, but they're certain to have enough pwr for your needs and they've got about a 6x5x2 footprint. They've only got one built-in rj45 port, but they've got something like 2-4 USB ports so you could string several USB ethernet controllers off the back for more interfaces as needed... (yeah, I know, not ideal, but it's probably 90% of what you want. ideally they'd have a pci slot for a multiport server nic; if nothing else just put the usb nics on the slow interfaces (e.g. the wan links)) The Shuttle cases are within the 9x9 part of your spec but are probably a litte too tall...

That is pretty tiny. You might check out the guys over at embsd.org, specifically this thing. Out of the box you could do NAT and Firewall with it I'm sure... I'd imagine Syslog (with a disk of some sort) and SNMP too. Only question is whether or not the cpu has enough grunt for IDS... Also, and this is a more expensive solution, you might consider getting one of the Cappucino mini-PCs over at thinkgeek. They'll set you back 800-1100, but they're certain to have enough pwr for your needs and they've got about a 6x5x2 footprint. They've only got one built-in rj45 port, but they've got something like 2-4 USB ports so you could string several USB ethernet controllers off the back for more interfaces as needed... (yeah, I know, not ideal, but it's probably 90% of what you want. ideally they'd have a pci slot for a multiport server nic; if nothing else just put the usb nics on the slow interfaces (e.g. the wan links)) The Shuttle cases are within the 9x9 part of your spec but are probably a litte too tall...

Try emBSD for a similar concept. They sell a box with no moving parts (no hard drive) to help incrase the life of the box. It is a stripped down OpenBSD aimed at being a router/firewall box.

If bulk is your thing, I'm sure you could find a small board that Linux (or certainly netbsd) will run on (example: embsd.org's board), and fitting a full-featured install of either of the above OSen onto a CompactFlash device from SanDisk (ide adaptors are available for not much, media is pretty cheap) isn't hard... Heck using the PCMCIA slot on that board, you could have (up to) a gig to play with via IBM's microdrive for the system "disk". This means that you'd be using an operating system with a much larger user community that whatever proprietary thing you went with, and not to be neglected, the free OSen would be, well, uh... free. ;-) SAMBA, netatalk, ftp, nfs, afs, coda, etc. all pretty much guarantee that your little *nix machine could talk to pretty much anything with a power cable. The embsd board has a PCI slot, so you could easily stick a raid adaptor on it, and with 3 10/100 interfaces you probably don't have to worry about network I/O... All in all, a pretty cheap solution: $255 for the board, $0 for the OS and software, maybe $300 for an ata100 pci board and a couple of big ass IDE drives... This would scale up to N many scsi drives / raid, blah blah... all while taking up way less space and pwr than a desktop (the embsd board also has a bios that allows serial-console-only admin of everything, a la the PC WEASEL).

So does picobsd EmBSD won't fit on a floppy but it's a shrunk down version of OpenBSD. Seems like the closedBSD guys are reinventing the wheel.

Check these guys out, along with these guys.

Really nice headerless SBC with 3x 100TX, BIOS supports serial console, etc and OpenBSD whittled down to fit into 32MB CF card `disk'.

emBSD based firewalls are built on OpenBSD. Right now there is a 1.x line of emBSD which is built on OpenBSD 2.9, and there is a 2.0 emBSD beta which is built on OpenBSD 3. It is built to be a hard core firewall/router running from 32 megs of flash memory. I'm running LRP on a few systems (some floppy, some from IDE based solid state disks). I plan to migrate my LRP systems to emBSD 2.0 when it comes out of beta.

Actually Gnat is FreeBSD based, at the time they took a kernel I'm not even sure OpenBSD had started. And FreeBSD was at the time heavily X86 focused IIRC.

If you want a no-moving-parts OpenBSD based firewall, you can build one up using embedded OpenBSD, aka emBSD, see their site for details. They use the Soekris single-board computer with Flash IDE to get a nice little firewall with pf and OpenBSD.

EmBSD, have to say I am a pretty big advocate of "less is more", basically it is the bare minimum of OpenBSD for securing a network (kernel, packet filter, ssh, syslogd and ipsec/named/dhcpd if you need em) and it all fits on under 32 meg and its all under the BSD license, so its free. It all comes preconfiged for firewalling (ipf and ipnat turned on and everything else just gone or turned off), so there is less to make mistakes with, less means less vulrablities and less to manage. So I would say look at EmBSD after reading this article and compare for yourself.

EmBSD, have to say I am a pretty big advocate of "less is more", basically it is the bare minimum of OpenBSD for securing a network (kernel, packet filter, ssh, syslogd and ipsec/named/dhcpd if you need em) and it all fits on under 32 meg and its all under the BSD license, so its free. It all comes preconfiged for firewalling (ipf and ipnat turned on and everything else just gone or turned off), so there is less to make mistakes with, less means less vulrablities and less to manage. So I would say look at EmBSD after reading this article and compare for yourself.

Yeah, it won't play UT, but I'd much rather have this, especially with some 802.11 luvin and a crypto card... uberkludge.

I could see a pretty decent little business in doing diskless firewalls and routers using an LRP image or an EmBSD firewall image on a microATX x86 box. Just add the configuration files to your keychain, boot it and run in RAM. Sweet.

There is another small BSD offshoot in the name of emBSD. It is a stripped down version of OpenBSD and its primary objective is to create a firewall and/or router using as little hardware as possible (ideally with not moving parts like a hard drive).

It's a small box, 64 meg 'o ram, Compact Flash slot, MiniPCI / Normal PCI slots, as well as 3 ethernet interfaces.

http://www.embsd.org/
http://www.soekris.com/

It's being used in the emBSD (aka embedded OpenBSD) project as a great firewall box.