Previously I had run pfSense as my firewall / router on a discarded Celeron 700mhz machine, with a lot of spare NICs in the PCI slots. Browsing around the local Goodwill and I stumbled upon this Watchguard Firebox X500 for $10. Finally, real rackmount gear for my 2×4 server rack!

I’m sure whatever software comes on this thing is great and wonderful, but I didn’t even try to use it. First step if you have one of these – hop on over to the pfSense Firebox wiki page and do some research. Popped open the case, swapped in a 2gb CF card with the pfSense no-VGA embedded image, and set to configuring it. The most difficult part of all this was getting a USB to Serial cable that worked… and then a Null Modem cable… and then having to do the configuration in a virtualized Windows XP machine because there are no OSX drivers for the WCH341 chip in my cheap eBay usb-serial converter.

Now that it’s all set up I can easily access via ssh or http, so serial access isn’t as important. The hardware in this is just a 1.2ghz Celeron, with 10/100 Ethernet ports and some 256mb RAM. Obsolete, yes, but that red paint job never goes out of style.