I took the opportunity to upgrade my Smoothwall to the new version 3 last night, and took some pictures of my “network closet”.  I think this serves as an example of how NOT to EVER treat the heart of your home’s connectivity.  My network closet is currently just an area of my unfinished basement with a little table set up to hold everything.  There’s a big, ancient, 3Com switch, a smaller gigabit switch, my cable modem, my trusty Asus wireless AP, and the router for my VoIP service.  Note the huge power strip on the floor, right next to my water heater.

So last night’s project brought up a unique case of jury-rigging.  The little Compaq thing I’m using for the Smoothwall used a laptop CD drive, which has gone bad.  The power connector wasn’t a standard Molex, and I could not find a splitter anywhere.  My power supply supplies have suffered severe losses,  so I couldn’t do a dual power supply thing.  Luckily, I found a fix.

In my rummaging, I turned up an unused USB-IDE hard drive case.  I stole the power from that and plugged the IDE in from the Smoothwall box, and was able to make the upgrade from there.  Ugly, but workable. 

So how’s Smoothwall 3?  It’s a decent upgrade, actually.  I wouldn’t run and upgrade if you’ve got a good system going, but the built-in QoS should help when I’m trying to torrent and make a phone call at the same time, and there are many more configuration options right in the GUI.  I’d say consider it if you’re needing a little extra bandwidth management or switching from a store-bought router/firewall.