The last piece of HW that I have in my rack other than my unRAID box is a Dell PE1750 that I run pfSense on for my FW/Router needs.  I would love to be able to decom this box and move pfSense to a VM but I have one major obstacle...

 

My wife works from home pretty much 5 days a week.  With my current setup,iIf I am at work and unRAID dumps, I can still remote into a Windows machine at home and get to the unRAID box via IPMI.  However, if this were to happen when using pfSense as a VM, I would not have a route in from outside.

 

Can anyone think of a solution for this?

 

The only thing I can come up with is some kind of failover mechanism that would direct inbound/outbound traffic to a separate router (I have a box full of Linksys/Cisco routers).  I don't know if there is some kind of device the I can put in between the routers (Linksys AND unraid external facing nic) and the cable modem that will do this.

 

John

I use an IP power switch to help maintain control of my systems.  Some devices are powered directly via the switched outlets; cable modem, router, switch, etc... Some equipment- like my server & its UPS are, instead, powered directly, but I bought a handful of $2 cell phone chargers (basically tiny switcher power supplies) at GoodWill, and I use those to drive relays which are tied to the reset/power buttons of various things- so I can remotely power up or reset any/everything.  The autoping option sounded better than it was.  It basically allows you to configure the power strip to automatically run a script if a ping to an IP goes unanswered x# of times.  Initially, I had it set to cycle power to my cable modem if it detected the net was gone.  My cable service sucked at-the-time, so it was forever rebooting my modem.  But for your purposes, I think you could use the feature to automatically monitor an internal IP and act accordingly.  Just a thought. 

 

This model is actually the successor to the one I have.  http://www.digital-loggers.com/lpc.html