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LewisO Author

Level 1

4 points

Suggestions for firewall, gateway, VPN in front of MacMini SNL server

Hi, I'm looking for suggestions for a firewall, gateway, vpn box to place between my cable box and a Mac Mini Snow Leo Server. Looking for easy setup and support, affordable, and decent performance. Site has 3-6 active workers depending on season, would never grow beyond say 10. Maybe 2-3 vpn connections used very sporadically... ie. no one's used a vpn connection on old server in the last 7 months.

Mac Mini Server, Mac OS X (10.6.2)

Posted on Mar 13, 2010 9:35 PM

16 replies

May 1, 2010 11:50 AM in response to Steven Slupsky

A Mac Mini? If you have a spare one kicking around (and with the two network connections appropriate for your network) and have a willingness to set up IP routing and tussle with NAT and VPN on the box, well, sure.

Folks with Mac Mini boxes around usually use those as, well, Mac Mini boxes and want to run Mac OS X on them.

The dedicated firewall boxes or a (spare; old; slow) x86 box with two network controllers can load m0n0wall or smoothwall or pfsense onto is are among the more common choices.

It's all in how much time and resources and money you want to spend on the configuration, and on maintaining it, and on what (spare) hardware you have in your stash. A typical dedicated box or an x86 box loaded with open-source firewall software usually configures more easily, and you usually don't have to fuss with it or update it with any frequency.

Suggestions for firewall, gateway, VPN in front of MacMini SNL server

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