Untangle UTM for my home network - best configuration

Well, after so many years and so many broadband upgrades I have decided to go for a more "out of the box" approach. This is easy to reproduce by anyone with some level of experience. Hardware used: Optiplex 755 CPU - Core2Duo 2.4 Ghz RAM - 2GB HDD - 80GB SATA NIC - 2 x Intel Network cards Based on the experience so far I can say it works a treat. So, if you want to have an appliance that will just simply work in the background and requires virtually no maintenance other than the usual dusting and agree with the upgrades then you can use this. In my case I had no issues, it keeps running after so many years. I hope it will be the same for you. Just save the configuration every now and then and enjoy. Good luck

After more than a year of using the E6300 on G31 with two Intel network cards like I explained in the other post I can confirm that: - in 24/7/365 use the machine performs admirable - the browsing experience has improved greatly - safe experience, no mallware, very little ads - large file transfers flawlessly - stable - low costs - perfectly suitable for DIY project So even though I did not reach the depths of the abilities of this appliance for a heavy home user as myself it is what I need. I know that I cannot conceive now my home network without it. The only thing I would add is that my 30GB HDD is not quite large enough. Even though most of the time the drive is used less than 10% for some reason in a couple of days the drive became full. Since the unit was headless I had to shutdown the network, log in to the local console ... a paifull and long process. So 80GB as actually recommended by the guys from Untangle sounds about right for the size of my network. All in all

Now ... let me explain a couple of things. My experience with Untangle comes from trial and error and reading. Trial and error was not so bad, just a lot of time waste, if only I didn't spend that money and go directly for the winning formula. You see, if you want to protect your home network you have quite a task on your hands. You are up against power failure, hardware failure,viruses, malware, unwanted pop-ups, unwanted advertising and even your own mistakes. Sometimes you install a bit of software and there you are BANG!!! your browser has a new toolbar with some search window and lots of buttons - and all in the name of enhanced user experience. I will let you decide if that is enhanced or not. Lately even the Adobe Flash updates have ticked the McAfee scanner embedded in the download. All respect for Mr McAfee but anything unwanted can be deemed bad quite easily. Anyhow Untangle proves to be quite the tool in this fight. Even if you clean your system periodically the cumu

UPDATES: November 2012 I have reinstalled the whole thing on the E6500 with G31 2GB RAM and a 30GB 2.5" HDD The 32 bit vs 64 bit made little difference so I left it with the 32 bit. I am VERY please with the results. The ping is 5ms on 60MBps connection. The results in speedtest.net are splendid. Steady flat graph ... beatifull. So if you need a configuration to use as refference there you have it. CPU:              E6500 2.93 GHz Core2Duo - no overclock Mainboard:     P5KPL-AM Memory:         1x2GB DDR2 HDD:              1x30GB Toshiba PATA IDE 2.5" Network:         2xIntel Pro 100S Good luck.

Well ... enough with the general talk. I am sure you can do searches and you can find more details and much better explained. Let's get more specific. I have tried Untangle in: virtual environment - Virtualbox on a OptiPlex SX260 mini-desktop on Gigabyte deluxe with two Broadcom network cards on the motherboard P4 3.4 HT 2GB RAM 80 GB 3.5 SATA HDD on a ASUS G31 series with E6500 2.93 GHz Core2DUO 2GB RAM 160 GB 2.5 SATA HDD and two 10/100 MB PCI Intel PRO Server network cards.   My conclusions: CPU makes little difference when using the UTM. When you login to administrate the machine the CPU does matter though. 2GB of RAM is plenty. HDD after a lot of downloading will get close to 10GB used maybe. Never got beyond 20GB. Better to have 20GB or more so the machine will have room to read/write. I started with Untangle 6 and at the time 20GB was plenty. What does matter though in my view are the network cards . Very important .  On the Optiplex SX260 since I had unly 1 RJ4

It all started with a laptop . After a while there was a desktop also. After that came the rest: - another desktop - another laptop and so on ... Also when you have guests most would like to use internet. How do you manage? How do you protect? What happens if one of them or more gets viruses? What happens if you need to upgrade? All these little changes to my list of requirements kept adding over time. So ... the items: - the Server - fancy name for something made of leftovers. A PC with hard drives inside that can store at least some of the important date shared between everybody: documents, photos, videos, music etc. My opinion is that you should have at least 2 hard drives inside. This way you can have a second copy on a separate disk. Do not forget! Hard drives do crash sometimes . There is no way of telling when and how but it is just a matter of when. And if you loose one disk that you have the second one. Depending on your skill level you can have these tasks aut