An ounce of prevention

In our rather large home-office network I have been using an old PC running IPCOP (Linux-based firewall distribution) as a firewall.  And by "old" I really mean OLD.  Since it had been running 24x7 for many years I decided to build up (add 3 network cards, etc) a "newer" old PC as a replacement.  The plan also called for refurbishing the old firewall as a back-up to the new firewall.

It all went according to plan but, about a week after the new firewall was in place it experienced a memory error -- which results in a kernel panic and a system halt.  If I didn't have the old firewall still sitting nearby this would have meant a day or more of no internet access, several websites unavailable to the outside world and probably other network problems as well, since the firewall is also a DHCP server.

For sure I will be building up back-up machines for the web-server, the file-server and might even pick-up some other spare network components as well.