Low Bandwidth 101

I finally switched my router distribution from IPCop to IPFire. I was hoping for the 2.0 to become stable of IPCop, but even though SVN/CVS updates are occurring, no real releases have happened. As the last major update to IPCop was mid 2008 and still runs the 2.4 kernel, most newer hardware isn't supported. While my new firewall isn't all that new (Pentium M on an Axiomtek Board) it was running into some oddities with the older IPCop that went away with the much more current IPFire. Also, IPFire has one of the most important addons (for me at least), updateaccelerator built-in from the get-go. It is also more of a standard distribution despite being built from LFS sources, so programs such as Teamspeak3 can be installed on the box without too much difficulty.

Did run into a couple of interesting issues though, one that had a couple of good tutorials, and one that didn't. The easy one was getting the update cache from my old IPCop machine to my new IPFire box.
Yes, it is possible.
A quick, well written refresher on SCP. If you do copy over with SCP, you will need to initiate the copy from the IPFire side, as the SSH in IPCop does not have SCP.

As for issue #2, I use namecheap.com's dynamic DNS service, which IPCop supports but the current build of IPFire does not. Due to the wonderful nature of opensource and IPFire being a less obfuscated IPCop derivative, I was able to kludge together what I needed.
So today I was able to replace a 2.66GHz P4 & an Athlon XP 1800+ machine with a single 1U system running IPFire on a Pentium M. Now to see if my power bill actually goes down at all...

Turns out the bloody thing supports USB keyboard and mice out of the box. All that work for nothing I guess.
Currently wrangling IPCop onto it. By default it only supports up to 4 NICs, but at the moment it has seven. I put a 3com 10/100 NIC in so I'd have a clue as to which one is my WAN port.

http://www.ipcops.com/wiki/howto:interfaces
Turns out its going to take a bit of work to set it up the way I want to. At least I can use the box directly now instead of figuring out how to wrestle with the serial ports. I can always do that later.

I may try the tricks here to try and get the LCD on the front to do something useful.