5 Aug
2006
5 Aug
'06
1:52 p.m.
Don Y wrote:
I don;t let my machines talk to the outside world
(this is the
easiest way for me to keep everything 100% secure with zero
effort on my part :> ) so if I cant use the MIPS, they get
wasted. :-(
You obviously let at least one machine talk to the outside world,
after
all, how else are you reading and responding to this mailing list? :-)
Yes, your LX does count as a machine, even if it's only running at
40Mhz. :-D
I find a well secured openbsd box to be a nice secure firewall,
NAT/router. I route my web traffic through a squid, that way I can
catch any possible rogue applications trying to talk to outside machines
over http, ftp, or smpt. Local firewalls on all the boxes help too.
Esp. on windows where you get pop ups letting you know what's trying to
talk to the outside world.
I had inherited three Dell Precision 410MT's (dual Piii/600's)
and thought of replacing the LX and Classic that serve as my
routers with them. But, the size (tower-ish) and power
(not just $$$ but BTU's as well -- this is AZ so we don't
need any extra heat even in Winter!) differences between them
and the cute little SPARC boxes made this a no-brainer
decision. (I kept one of the Dells and donated the other
two to a local charity. In hindsight, perhaps I should
have lifted the memory out of them and flushed-up the one
that I kept :< )
Yup, for every watt of CPU power, you need another watt (or
is it more?)
to cool it. RAM is cheap these days, ~$100=1GB. So don't fret over the
memory. There are machines I rarely power on at home for the same
reason. They're too expensive to run, so I only power them when I need to.