[ale] Buy vs. build

[David Hillman]

Our firewall is close to dead.  My boss wants to buy an expensive one.  I
think it's better to build.  We had problems extending the old firewall,
plus it would give us a chance to actually have OpenVPN on the firewall box
itself.  The trouble is figuring out how to get to a working solution that's
flexible and affordable.  Should we go with a trihomed solution?  Should
OpenVPN then listen on all interfaces, or just the external one?  How does
this all fit in with our Active Directory and DNS server?  Can OpenVPN
easily deal with Active Directory?  How should packets be routed from the
VPN connection to the internal network and to the DMZ?  Should we go with a
powerful little box that has iptables on the hardware and something like
Virtualbox + PHPVirtualbox for everything else?  By the way, we were using a
Secure Computing box before.

The AD box can then be virtualized and consolidated inside the one physical
box.  Our web box (virtualized) and file server box would still stay
separate.  Then, how do we tie the virtualized AD service back into the LAN?
 Through the internal network interface via virtual switch?  What are the
chances of the firewall box failing?  Of course, we were thinking of a
Mini-ITX board with Intel Atom (no fans) and RAID 1 SSD drives.  Are there
any good books dealing with issues like these?  I can understand buying to
save time, but how many headaches do you have to put up with down the road
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