Right so the aim of this project is to route a lot of stuff around the place using as little power as possible.

I went with this mobo with 1gb of ram its a dual core Atom 333 with 1gbit lan onboard and about 8watt power usage (If you believe the marketing material!) and a 4gb cf card for a hd.

Intel Little Falls 2 with Integrated Intel Atom 330 Processor i945GC onboard VGA 6 channel audio mini-ITX Motherboard
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152176


Now in my current enviroment I have two broadband connections each with different DMZ's on seperate vlans and two seperate networks on 2 more vlans. The aim of this is to keep my servers and such out of the way of my dads network so that he can have an easy to maintain simply router setup.

The only issue is that I want more control over what on which network can see what on the other. If that makes sense. This is where the vlan routing part is going to come in. The box is hopefully going to run pfsense and route between the various vlans, so when I am home for example I can choose which broadband connection I want to use.

PFsense will also act as a firewall and port forwarder for the web server and the mail server. This is where Varnish comes in http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/ this allows me to route packets based on their header information so I can host https on both the mail and web server and distinguish between where the packets should go based on the http header ie. mail.grippers.co.uk or www.grippers.co.uk etc. Varnish also supports load balancing and failover support so I will be using it to forward traffic to an error page if the webserver or mail server goes down.

I also plan on adding vpn support to this setup at some poing.

Building starts on Tuesday will post some pics and progress

ps. I know vlans at home and routing etc is a bit overkill but I find its the best way to learn stuff plonking it in at home and having a play.

Cool Mupet, sounds like a sure-fire way to learn about some advanced networking. You can't pay for experience, and that's what you'll get.

You can put it on your CV, however you might want to tell a white lie and make it a small project at a workplace rather than a home-project?!

Out of interest, can it also load-balance over multiple ADSL connections?

Yeh pfsense supports multi wan with sticky connections. In short you give it a server outside on the net and it will ping it to work out the latency on both connections then balance the users between the two. The sticky part means that it understands if there are authenticated sessions etc on one of the connections and not to swap a client over mid way through a session. So that might be added in at some point.

Got the stuff today and just watching it all install never realised just not small itx is very nice little board for £70 happy so far! Will post some pics of the build later today.

Getting fairly close now just setup all the vlans and now have to attempt to seamlessly move over between the old clark connect router and the new pfsense box! Never realised how many firewall rules I had till I sat here trying to move them all over to the new router. Box is working well tho, runs very cool and uses very little power which is all good!