The old timers in this forum, who remember me from years past, would know that I don't upgrade my home firewall very often.
I have been very conservative in that regard, typically running the same install for years on end.
I first installed ASG v4 back on Jan 1st, 2004.
I stayed with v4 for years after that.
I skipped v5, which I don't regret.
I finally upgraded to v6 when Astaro killed off the support for v4.
I skipped v7 too.
Three years ago, in April 2011, I upgraded to v8.
I had some memory leakage problems at first, but once I got the IPS exceptions configured for my bit torrent traffic, it turned out to be OK.
For the last year, I have had a test box sitting on the floor in my home office with UTM 9 on it.
I used it just to play with, to familiarize myself with the design changes.
It wasn't actually doing any routing.
It was a cheap HP mini tower with 1 GB RAM and 100 Mbit Ethernet on the motherboard that I had bought used for less than $100.
My three year home license for ASG v8 expires in early April, so I thought I better upgrade my firewall now.
I downloaded the new UTM v9.2 ISO image and burned the CD.
Since my test box was a faster machine than the existing router, I decided to use it for my new router install.
But it needed some work. I purchased an Intel Gigabit PCI-X Ethernet card for it, and swapped out the two 512 MB DIMM's for a 1 GB and a 2 GB DIMM.
That gave me a machine that exceeded the hardware specs of my old router.
The old router, a Compaq EVO D530 had Gigabit Ethernet on the motherboard.
The HP DX2300 mini tower did not. So adding the Intel Gigabit card was necessary to maintain Gigabit throughput to my LAN, which is powered by a handful of 5 and 8 port Netgear Gigabit switches distributed around the house.
All the PCs in my house, and I have quite a few, have Gigabit Ethernet connections.
Old firewall:
ASG v8.311 at home - HP Compaq EVO D530 2.66 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 40 GB HD, 3 NICs - Gigabit LAN - 15 Mbit WAN
New firewall:
UTM v9.200 at home - HP DX2300, dual core 1.8 GHz, 3 GB RAM, 60 GB HD, 3 NICs - Gigabit LAN - 15 Mbit WAN
The 9.2 install gave me the option of installing the 64-bit kernel, which I did.
I configured the new firewall manually by bringing the webadmin of both firewalls up on the screen side by side in browser windows, and walking through the pages and tabs and recreating the entries.
All except the two additional IP addresses I have attached to the Internal interface (.1 for router and .6 for proxy) and the DHCP server.
They would have to wait until the box was in place, to avoid conflicts.
Doing the configuration entries manually was a bit tedious, but it did provide me with the opportunity to re-familiarize myself with the webadmin, since I don't exactly look at it every day.
And I didn't want to import a configuration, bringing with me any baggage that I didn't want.
Except for an initial gremlin with a link error on the WAN interface a couple of days ago, everything went well.
This afternoon I swapped the two routers, and I am now up an running on my new one.
This is a milestone for me, since it is the first time in 10 years of use that I have put an odd numbered Astaro release into production on my LAN.
But so far so good. I am hosting my bit torrent traffic through it now, and there are no signs of any memory leaks.
So I guess I can go back to sleep for another 3 years. [:)]
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