Well i got the servers in and really didn’t want to wait for the 12u rack…mainly because it’s not int he budget right now. I took one of the servers and have installed untangle on it. I now have 4 network cards in the thing. One is red(internet), one is blue(free public wifi) and one is green(church’s internal network). The 4th one is for future use(which I already have a plan for). What are the specs of this box? It is an IBM x335 with dual xeon 2.8ghz cpu’s with HT , 4 gigs of ram, and two 36 gig 10k U320 SCSI hdd’s in hardware raid 1. The thing just smokes..:) I’m waiting for a couple of major events to really test the box:
1. the Don Piper conference we are having
2. Upward basketball.
Upward is going to be the bigger test as we’ll have hundreds of folks inside the new wing from 9am to 6pm sat and sun every week for about 3 months. I’m hoping to get at least 20 folks on that so i can see how this box handles it.
I had a Dell Poweredge 1800 running Astaro as the firewall until this donation came in. Our e-mail is run by a company called powweb and I have been hearing for a long time about unreliable service, crashing interfaces, and other issues for months now. since the Dell is 64 bit compatible I decided to press that one into use as the new church e-mail server. The test for the firewall is can it handle everything i’m going to throw at it? e-mail, content filtering, anti-virus scanning, packet inspection, remote access..etc etc etc. My research tells me it will. The most fascinating thing about Untangle is it makes heavy use of Java. Java is at the core of the entire system and ALL traffic passes through this Java core. So far it’s worked without a hitch. I’ve setup some simple traffic priority rules that say the church’s traffic has the highest priority and the free wifi has the lowest. I’ll be watching the server closely to see how it does..not that I’m anticipating problems..but this is a new product that has impressed me..and i want to see it work under load as i look at the innards to see how it works..:) Cost for all of this? 105$ and that was just to cover shipping,,:) All of the software is free.