[plug] OT (?) low heat & low noise linux box for firewall?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, 9 Sep 2002 13:06:59 +0800 (WST), Bret Busby wrote:

| We use as a gateway/firewall/server, a Cyrix 6x86 P120+ ; a 100MHz CPU.

We have a 133MHz version of these ("PR166") as a home gateway box. Besides
the fact that its L2 cache is completely broken and so it runs dog slow, it
isn't bad. At one point, the CPU fan stopped spinning entirely.
Surprisingly, it ran for well over a week like this without any problems,
and then spontaneously rebooted and didn't even get past LILO. I bought a
replacement fan for it which was quite noisy, so I desoldered the gunky
white HDD connector and ran it off the 5V line.  Now there's plenty of air
across the CPU and no problems at all.

The Cyrix chips produce more heat than the Intel chips of their ilk.  I
wouldn't be surprised if an Intel P100 would run with just a heatsink.

CP.