[TriLUG] Consumer-grade dual-home Internet connection options

[John Broome]

Paul Bennett wrote:
> Is it going to be a more-effective solution to drop a few bucks on the 
> 2960 and go through the hassle of learning how to set it up (and then 
> setting it up), or would I be better off putting a secured Linux distro 
> (e.g. gentoo-hardened, or something) on the semi-spare PC and running 
> the load-balancing via iproute2 and friends?
> 
> Either way, I'm looking at a learning curve, and a good amount of time 
> fannying around getting the damn thing working -- there's a good chance 
> I'd spend almost as much cash on the PC-based solution getting 
> good-quality network cards, and maybe fast HDD tech (though it seems 
> like RAM and cores would be more important than disk IO).

I'd skip the cisco, and skip using the quad core as a firewall.

I'm agreeing with Ronald that pfsense is the way to go, but please don't 
waste that desktop on something as piddly as a firewall.

Grab an old dell off craigslist or ask here and use that.  Disk IO 
doesn't matter a flip, cores don't matter, and ram marginally matters. 
My old obsd firewall was run on a p200 with 32 mb ram and a 4gb drive 
(only because that was the smallest I had around).

Hell, you can run pfsense off a compact flash card or off a live CD with 
the configs going onto a USB key.