Along with the housemove, I have the additional opportunity to redefine/reconfigure the Thorp Family Network 
but this is easier said that done. As I may have mentioned, I run Smoothwall on an old PC acting as the firewall and DHCP server for the house. I am 100% happy with Smoothwall as a product, but as a piece of hardware this box has one major problem when it comes to the new flat – size. It resides in a large tower case, which is likely to be far too big for the new house. Thus I come to my decisions:
- Keep with the old box, and find a clever place to hide it in the flat
- Keep with the old hardware, but put it in a new, smaller, case
- Keep with Smoothwall, but buy a smaller PC off eBay to run it on
- Replace the whole lot with an all-in-one piece of hardware. Most likely would be this offering from Linksys, which runs on Linux, and for which you can get a whole load of goodies
I am leaning towards (4) at the moment, although (3) has some merit. (2) is too much like hard work when we’re trying to move house. (1) is still an option, although I will need to go and measure some spaces
Any thoughts/comments/experiences are more than welcome.
mrBen
Smoothwall can also run on a laptop (there’s a special kernel version available with pcmcia support) – that way you would have two problems solved: size and access (screen, keyboard)
If your network isn’t that big, the WRT54g sure is the best and cheapest solution!
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