..does anyone know of HArdWare Based PCI firewall that you can stick into your box, like the ones offered by dialtone?

Hum.. Never heard of such a thing. Interesting :)

...said they were using something called Omni???

Tried searching the web but couldn't find anything along the lines of that matching a firewall

Most likely he was talking about OmniCluster's SlotServer Product (http://www.omnicluster.com/). Essentially, it is a PC on a PCI card. You can shove a bunch of them into a server to make clusters or you can have each card performing a different task.

He is probably talking about this (warning PDF document):

http://www.omnicluster.com/marketingtools/HostingFirewall.pdf

This basically allows you to build a firewall directly into the server. The only problem is that it is a bit of a farce. If you know what you are doing a centralized firewall can be just as effective, in fact more effective, than a firewall attached directly to your server.

Here's another one to consider but it doesn't use a PCI slot:

http://www.gnatbox.com/Pages/GBFlash.html

Pretty small. :)

..that was just what I was looking for.

cheers!

Interesting way to do a firewall :)

Interesting yes. But cheap they are not!

But on the plus point, if you're co-located hosts were to provide you with multi ports, you could actually stick 2 servers into the same price as one :-)

Hi all
Take a look a http://www.smoothwall.org

Cheers Pete

The idea of turning a donor PC into a full fledge HArdware Based Firewall sound interesting..

Have you used it in an ISP environment.? Most of the docs are targetted towards end user/soho environment.

Regarding smoothwall: first, this is a software solution and this thread is about a hardware solution. Second, acording to a well known computer magazine (c't) this product has some serious flaws:
passwords and configuration details in textfiles, some even writeable and so on...
Source: http://www.heise.de/ct/02/01/162/default.shtml