Topic: Building a firewall device

[hans]

In my ever running quest for cheap enterprise solutions to complex enterprise problems I'm wondering about the practicality of building a router/firewall device. I'm finally working for a company that takes uptime seriously and being the good open source utilizer I am I keep trying to come up with reliable alternatives to the really expensive solutions that you don't use 80% of the features for (but still have to pay).
My quest has reached the network access level and so I'm trying to find a bang-for-buck solution for high availability router/firewall solutions.
I question if you can beat something like a Cisco Pix device by simply building a rack server to do the same thing and more (like maybe application load balancing too).

So I'm checking my resources for creative ideas for solutions.

[Steve]

If you can build an equal or better solution to theirs for less cost (on your end and the consumers, of course) then in theory you COULD beat them.