A while back I wrote up some posts on my Firewall/Router/IDS solution that I use for my home network called Smoothwall.  The common nickname given to systems running the Smoothwall Express software is 'Smoothie'.  People will often refer to their 'smoothie' when describing their system or the modifications they have done to it.  There is even a section in the interface labelled 'mySmoothie', where a plethora of information about your server is available.  Currently my Smoothie is a pretty weak system.  It really doesn't need to be anything special though.  It's an 800 MHz Samuel 2 processor and 512 MB of ram.  The system is built on an old 4GB Western Digital IDE hard drive.  The case that houses the system sports a broken power switch.  It was actually funny for a while that whenever I needed to power the system on or off, I would use a pair of needle nose pliers and a jumper to short the pins.  Felt a lot like hot-wiring a car.  Recently, I added a big red button to the front of the case to replace the broken switch.  Works pretty good actually!

Anyway, I have an old Compaq server kicking around.  It's  a DL360 that I picked up on ebay.  It sports dual 1GHz Intel processors, 2 GB of ram, and dual SCSI 74 GB hard drives.  Only problem is that Smoothwall Express does not like the raid controller.  No matter what I tried or read, I could not get this thing to install.  So I gave up. 

The best part of this story is the part where I ordered a new CPU for an old motherboard I had kicking around.  I ordered an AMD Athlon 64 3200 that will be added to a decent Gigabyte motherboard that I have.  The board supports Sata drives, so hopefully I can add a 40 GB drive to keep Smoothwall happy.  The CPU should be here sometime this week, so I will let you know how it goes.