VaKo

PFsense + Snort on a ALIX? That I couldn't answer, you would be best off asking about this on the PFsense forums. Mine just does routing and firewall. As for the performance of a 330 vs a P4, the Atom will be faster, use less power and most importantly, take up a fraction of the space. My Jetway Atom 330 system takes up about half the space of a shoebox for instance. It comes down to what your doing with it, if your running lots of little tasks at the same time, Atom 330, if you running 1 task which needs lots of CPU, stick with the P4.

True. But a new atom system would take up less space, run cooler and be more powerful. Its your call really, I'd happily ditch that system for something smaller myself (the ALIX system I keep mentioning draws around 4W) but your right in thinking Al Gore won't be banging on your door with an award if you do choose to upgrade. And there is also the WAF scale to consider ;)

You basically have double the power for gaming, if your a hardcore gamer then go for it, but otherwise just spend the money on 1 card. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Link_Interface

I would honestly recommend a ALIX based PFsense router and a Atom based mini-itx system for a always on, low power general purpose server for everything else.

3GHz what? You need to list precise specs.

Yes, while *nix has perfectly good interpretation of DHCP and DNS servers, I personally find that the management tools for the Microsoft interpretations are an order of magnitude easier to use.

Yes, the unsupported FreeNAS addon for PFsense 2.0 which is due, and I quote, "sometime this year". If you want a NAS, build one around a Atom board, this one is worth looking at, as it has 4 SATA on-board. Or the Point of View MB-D510-MATX board with a PCIe x16 slot which would allow you to install additional SATA expansion cards. Also the Asus Hummingbird board looks very interesting as it has 4 SATA ports and IPMI features, which for a tiny NAS would be bloody useful. And still, 8GB of RAM is overkill for a NAS, my primary PC has 8GB of RAM and unless I'm running RAM heavy apps it idles with around 1.4GB of usage under Windows 7. FreeNAS et al will use far, far less.

The iPhone 4 is an absolutely beautiful bit of design work, nothing android is one even comes close. But Apple lock it down far to much for my liking, so I'm happy with my Nexus One.

No need. You install the embedded version by imaging PFsense to a CF card, then configuring it via a null modem cable. For the interface PFsense has, null modem is perfectly fine.

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm Runs PFsense from a CF card, but also has a 44 pin IDE header if you want to attach a DOM or laptop HDD. About the size of one of those old fashioned double CD cases. If you want to go bigger, I would recommend something like a Jetway JNC92-330-LF with the optional 3 port gigabit ethernet addon module, or the Jetway J7F4 with dual gigabit. For a home network, a core2 based router with 8GB of RAM is just a massive amount of overkill, and wasted power consumption (1GB would be more than enough). You don't really want to put wireless directly on the PFsense box itself either. Plus for a router, it needs to rate higher on the WAF scale than a server would.

I never posted on this thread.

The main reason for not using smoothwall as your wireless AP, and hanging a WAP off of one of the optional interfaces is because smoothwall has shit wireless support.

To be totally fair, there are far more cases when someone goes "I have windows, and when I try to do this, I get this error. Doing x, y and z hasn't fixed it, any ideas?", and then some annoying cunt will go "well the problem is obviously that your using windows, only stupid people use windows, so you must be stupid, hence your problem!". People get sick of this, so if someone posted something about Windows, and you replied with a linux solution (and lets face it Mr n3rdy, much as we all love you, you do tend to give the impression that much of your life is spent shouting at people ;). Can you not see why people mistook your honest mistake for yet another linux evangelist and over reacted?

If your just doing routing and a firewall, you don't need much. But if your doing QOS, caching, etc, you'll need more.

Check facebook on your phone.

I am the top admin on this forum lol.

Ok,, you want to put some firewall rules between you WLAN and LAN interfaces if you wish to control traffic between the 2 networks, as the router is just routing traffic between said interfaces. VLANs are just a way of extending a broadcast domain across multiple physical locations, IE having all of finance in 192.168.10.0/23 despite being located in 3 different buildings on your site.

TBH I suspect he might be a troll. Either that or he is a complete dinkus when it comes to computers. Anyhoo, the path forward is clear, I shall not be involved any further.

Your ignoring how to fix this for some reason. DBAN everything, re-flash your router & change your MAC, install windows from a known good source. Job done.

Mount said disk on a 2nd windows machine and repair the partition, if possible. GParted is dodgy enough when it comes to NTFS, let alone trying to cancel a partition resizing midway through. Don't try and fix it with a linux disk check tool, that's just asking for more trouble.

PFsense will have 2 addresses in this setup, the first being the public IP your ISP assigned you, and the 2nd being the LAN IP. By default this will be 192.168.1.1 but you can use any address in the private IP ranges defined by rfc1918. What you will need is either a cable/dsl modem, or a DSL router with NAT, routing and the firewall disabled (so it acts just like a DSL modem). If you don't disable the NAT and firewall, you will have issues with things like port forwarding. If you want wireless, you will need a 3rd interface on PFsense, and then you can attach a wireless router to this, but configured to act as a wireless AP with no NAT, firewall or routing. As for DHCP, PFsense has a very nice DHCP server, but I personally prefer Microsoft's DHCP server.

Best to ask on the PFSense forums about specific bits of hardware, they do maintain a HCL however.

China's largest net output is network scans, if your firewall is blocking it and your not running any services you shouldn't be concerned.

Windows Backup or SyncToy2 (both free, but they don't have the features you want). If you have an MSDN license you could look at MS Data Protection Manager. Backup Exec is nice, but i'm guessing your home environment doesn't have a CAPEX budget ;)

If your not kicking large files about your network, or streaming HD media across it, you will probably be fine. Otherwise I'd use gigabit where possible and wireless for machines which can't be reached by cables or a reduction in bandwidth isn't an issue. As long as your wireless password isn't a dictionary word and 20+ chars you shouldn't have a problem with WPA2.