July 2009
I have been writing a lot about virtualiztion and going green over the last few weeks, but a thought hit me today as I was planning my next article. I realized that some Small/ Medium Sized Businesses(SMBs), may not even have an established data network to even begin implementing these solutions. I have been to many SMBs for various reasons both as a customer and as a technician and what I discovered was while most had one or several computers they were all stand alone boxes with little or no networking being used. To top it off most of these businesses depend on one computer for things like order tracking and even finances with pretty much no access control.
This is the follow up to my last article in which I promised to walk you through how to build your own small scale data-center for you Small Business. For our first part of the project we will start by building a simple but very robust hardware firewall running a Free BSD(Unix) operating system, called PfSense that can be deployed in less than an hour for the basic configuration. For this example this is the hardware I will be using an old Dell Dimension L866r pictured below ( yes a white Dell!). The reason that