The Hardware I went scrounging for no-longer-used equipment I could play with, and found a couple of firewall appliances from yesteryear, originally used at two customer sites before being replaced with something a bit faster. At a previous job, I used several units just like these to implement a mesh-type network between 3 sites over ipsec. With OpenBSD, of course. These are neat little boxes with zero moving parts - they boot off CF cards, and their entire case is one big heatsink.
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See what I did there? Yeah, I know. Pretty lame … Quick History I’ve been providing networking services for quite a while now. It all started with Data Generic’s Generic Barracks in the early 80’s, which was my 24-hour BBS running on the venerable Commodore 64. Over the past few decades I’ve leveraged a bunch of other technologies and products to provide networking services for customers. This includes Bay/Nortel/Juniper/ADTRAN/Cisco/NetWare/Microsoft/Linux and pretty much all the BSD flavors.
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Way back in the 60’s and 70’s, a fellow named Gordon Moore posited that computer processor complexity would double every two years. That is not precisely what he predicted (I have simplified it somewhat), and he amended this a few times since. But the idea that most of us take away from Moore’s Law is that computer speed/capacity/capability doubles every couple of years. And for the most part, this has turned out to be true.
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