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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many tech-savvy users have a complete reporting firewall, controlling in/out connections at home as opposed to a router with a custom password attached online.

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I've been pondering the idea of a more feature rich router/firewall device for my home connection. Something that would do like you say report, log, audit, etc. Any suggestions for specific model or models to look at?

I happily run OpenBSD as my firewall. It's developed by competent people who care about what they are doing and who take pride in their work. But it's general purpose Unix, it's not just a firewall or router.

Which means that it's more work to administer than something developed as a dedicated router or firewall.

Also I'm running on a generic x86 computer. I pay about $1/yr per watt drawn 24x7, which means my firewall costs me about $80/yr just in electricity. A smaller "appliance" type firewall would certainly have much lower operating costs.

Sorry I don't have any suggestions more tailored to your request. I'm just letting you know what works for me.

I run a beaglebone black, which draws about $4.82 dollars of electricity a year once I've plugged in all the externals (at $0.11c/kwh).

Wow, what's your price per kWH and what (rough) location?

8760 hours = 1 year

So...

a 1 Watt device running 24x7 = 8.760 kWh

billed at about $0.40/kWh [includes both generation and delivery and normal for NE USA - ain't deregulation great?!] ~ $3.50 per year.

In order to get to $1.00, total cost per kWh must be about $0.114 ...

Thanks, turns out I've had the wrong maths for this in my head for years!

me1010 beat me to it, I didn't know that HN keeps people from posting too often. It imposes a timeout! I know now! Anyway, here's my post, same cost info as he has. But I also had a discussion of power in various areas:

Portland Oregon metro area. Unfortunately for pricing the utility is Portland General Electric. Some places in the area have "people's utility districts", i.e. publicly owned. Those get preferential pricing from the govt, i.e. Bonneville Power. And the price per kWH is of course variable like in most communities (e.g. because of lifeline pricing).

Overall I'm paying about $0.12 per kWH. There are 24x30x12 hours in a year = 8640 hours. Therefore a kilowatt costs $1037 per year. Approximately.

I'm relatively happy, all things considered. It would suck to live in the People's Republic of California. My understanding is that peak pricing in some communities there could be 3x or more than what I'm paying.

Aha. The storage decisions I make will have to be a bit different given that I'm paying around $0.31 per kWH.

Thanks for that.

Maybe a ZyWall? The problem with more advanced routers is that they are a pain to set up and that you will most likely use features in comparison to a consumer router.

pfSense works great for me, been using it for a few years now.

Carambola 2 + OpenWRT or FreeBSD (if you are very tech savvy). Then using remote syslog to log everything on another device (RPi?). There you could run analytics.

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