A self-built router (and more. Comments?)

[Dralnu]

Ok, so I was on the porcelin throne the other day (isn't this where we all do our greatest thinking?), and since I will have two boxes in my room (one will be my desktop w/ a C2D, the other my current P4 as a file server), I might as well start working on myself a personal network, and hence build a router. There are a few things I was thinking of doing with said router, which includes (but may not be limited to):

Asterisk for both PCs, hooked into the home phone line. Not sure how this would work, but I'm sure you get my meaning
MythTV is a possibility, but definatly not required. I'd mostly just use it to play TV, and if I want, save a show (or two) to my file server for later viewing (this p4 will have ~1T of disk space once I can find myself two good 500G HDDs).
Firewall is pretty obvious, and the first of the functions is will handle.
DistCC, since I might as well use all three systems to compile everything. Hell, I might could manage OOo in the time I could watch a movie.

Something like this I was thinking of going with a smaller box (one that is easy to store, but not so small I'm afraid of it frying itself), but beyond that I'm not sure what all to install in such a thing. If I run Myth, I'm going to need at least a decent graphics card, for Asterisk, the card for it shouldn't be a pain (and fairly cheap from what I am told), and I know I will want a GB LAN (need to upgrade this p4 to it, and figure out what to do with the 10/100 in the mobo).

Comments, suggestions would be appreciated. I'm not necisarily looking for pretty - Function before flash.
_________________
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[SnakeByte]

Hello Dralnu,

I have the following setup here at my home, hopefully one can get a picture of the setup:

internet
|
|
DLS ( Germany )
|
hardware router
|
|
GBit switch
|
|
|- "media center"
| |
| |- mythtv
| |- home stereo
| |- data storage
|
|
GBit switch
|
|
|- main work machine
|
|- SGI Octane2
|
|


So in your case you would replace the hardware router with a small machine an put an asterix gateway on it so your net should be able to connect to the world from there.
Also this machine would have the focus in respect to packet filtering, mangling and NAT and act as firewall.

As far as I know MythTv should work with the video overlay function of the hardware so any video card sold after win98 should do fine.

For storing / replaying of recorded shows the 100MB net should be fast enough ( I can play dvdimages via NFS on my octane )
but you might need to tweak the network settings or used buffers.

Also its possible to export /usr/portage via NFS to all the machines in the net so there is one central repository to update and also binary packages can be stored there if there is not much difference in architecture or use the ARCH value as subdirectory for storing packages.

As the box should run several "multimedia" applications you should look into -ck or -rt patchsets to improve max. system latency as you might not need to have a binary driver loaded for any card, would you?



Only my first ideas.

[Dralnu]

[pdr]

If your server is not directly connected to dsl modem/internet. Otherwise I wouldn't directly have my firewall machine also be my file/etc server. I was going to do that, but decided the security risk wasn't worth it - wanted the server behind a firewall (linksys router). So I am similar to SnakeByte (but with only one Gb switch):

[Dralnu]

I think there might be some confusion here, so...