A "complete" appliance

[mar.ste]

Just wondering if someone has built an appliance with "all" the functionalities together. I mean:
- Wireless router / VPN
- NAS
- Multimedia streaming
- Firewall / IDS / ...

I was thinking of a simple (inexpensive and low power) Atom/Fusion mobo with 1 or more hd of storage, GB Ethernet, wifi capabilities, powered by FreeBSD with jails for FreeNAS (I love ZFS ), pfSense, etc...

 

[stevech]

Not that I've seen as a product.
Is doable as DIY, but a gateway/router should be autonomous (without NAS) for security reasons, in my opinion.

 

[thiggins]

Some consumer routers have USB ports that can share files from attached drives via SMB and sometimes FTP. The Cisco Linksys E4200 and NETGEAR WNDR4000 are examples.

Serious IDS devices don't have file sharing capabilities.

If you want to build your own IDS, see this series to get an idea of what you may be in for.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Your issue there will be the wireless component. Support for the many..many different wireless interfaces is difficult with the *nix distros. So they don't try to tackle that component.

Most users handle this by hanging a wireless AP or a wireless router off of their LAN side. What I have at home...my 1U *nix appliance which has 2x gigabit interfaces and runs whatever distro I'm running that month (this month it's PFSense, last month it was Untangle, months before that it was Astaro)...the LAN side NIC links to my wireless router running DD-WRT and it's running as an access point.

As for a "jack of all trades" distro....combining firewall/gateway, VPN, and NAS...I encourage you to look at ClearOS...it's sort of like an open source version of Microsoft Small Business Server.
http://www.clearfoundation.com/

 

[mar.ste]

Dear all,

Thanks for the comments! My replyes:

- I've look thru ClearOS and seems very interesting, but as it is built (part of ClearCenter) it seems more indicated for a small enterprise more than home network (you should subscribe to get updates, limited possibility to know hw compatibility in general, etc.)

- About the concept of serious IDS without file sharing: personally I think that if the intruder will be able to break an IDS and access the internal network then probably can break every other server in the network; placing the services on different VMs (or minimum jails or zones or etc) on the same HW is not exactly the same but very near to having them installed in different HW, isn't it?

I still think that saving 1 or more box (with power consumption connected) for a home server can be very interesting!...