Argonath (a new firewall)
For the last months, I noticed that my maximum download speed could not be reached. Rather by coincidence, I found out that while downloading something, the CPU on my firewall was in the red. I use pppoe to connect to my ISP, and pppoe takes *alot* of CPU time. Now, my current firewall was a Pentium I-166, and already in use since 2000, so I guessed it was time for a new machine. After browsing Ebay, I found a second hand Pentium III-650 which would do nicely. The machine runs Debian stable, and is called Argonath, after the double guardian statue which was placed on the borders of the Gondor empire. I opted for a XFS filesystem for the Squid cache, as it has the name of being one of the most performant filesystems around. I couldn't find a second hard disk, so no RAID setup. Pity, but a rsync will suffice for backup.