[conspire] Quiet, Freedom-compatible NAT/firewall/misc box?

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On 03/16/2015 03:38 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> At the most recent CABAL meeting, Dana Goyette ( /me waves from Hilo,
> HI) suggested that the AMD Kabini SoC (socket FM1) on a mini-ITX form
> factor motherboard might meet my needs for a multi-purpose silent, small
> machine on our inside network:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157574&cm_re=mini-itx_amd-_-13-157-574-_-Product

Actually, if memory serves, the board he suggested that night was 
Geode-based. You seem to have found something else. Here is a WiFi 
version of it: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-Q1500IW
The most oomph in an AMD SoC appears to be in the CompuLab fit-PC4 Pro, 
which has dual Ethernet and is currently orderable. Intel has offerings 
where Gigabit Ethernet and hardware crypto are on the SoC instead of 
video: http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-A1RI25
There are also AMD offerings without video:
https://www.deciso.com/netboard-a10/
That last one is from the company behind OPNsense, a new fork of pfSense 
and the official successor to the now-defunct m0n0wall distro.
The new version of Beema and Mullins is Carrizo, used in the Acer Aspire 
E5-422G and the HP 255 G4.
Here is another A4-5000 offering:
http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=MB-A68N-5K </hardware ramble>

As I understand it, you want a machine in sleeping quarters to eliminate 
location as a single point of failure on the inside network. Since you 
talked about deploying virtualization and possibly containerization on 
the Intense PC you purchased, the software solution for this use case 
that stands out is Swarm, which is to Docker containers what RAID is to 
data. You could install CoreOS on the machine in the sleeping quarters 
and in a VM on the Intense PC, with Docker containers on each being 
managed by Swarm and administrated directly from your MacBook Air. If 
any container needs access to storage, there is something called 
Flocker, too. </software ramble>

Having redundancy for your Internet presence in sleeping quarters still 
does not address the single point of failure that is connectivity. The 
Intense PC would live in the same space as the DSL modem and telco 
demarc, IIRC. You also have a CableCard TiVo, but I do not know whether 
it currently has Comcast service nor where the cable demarc is. 
Theoretically, you could get a separate Internet connection for the 
machine in the sleeping quarters to complete the redundancy. There is 
much more to be said about establishing this, but I won't waste my 
breath unless there is actual interest in it. <connectivity ramble>