[LUNI] My Smoothwall died, what should I do?

[russ arbuthnot]

Late last night, the Smoothwall machine which was running as the 
gateway/firewall/masquerading machine for my small business went kaput!

I checked it this morning to find that upon reboot it reported that there are 
problems with the file system and a check would need to be performed. Halfway 
through the check, it stops and says, "Enter root password to get to a shell 
or type Ctrl-D to reboot."

I typed in the password, and once at the shell, did a 'df -h' to see what the 
file system looked like. It reported that all the partitions were 14% full. 
Definitely not right, but that probably wasn't even the right thing to do. 
I've never had this happen before, so this is new territory for me.

My plan is, later today (I can't do it right now unfortunately), to try to 
reinstall smoothwall, and see if that works. I'm afraid it might not though, 
especially if the hard drive doesn't want to co-operate.

So my questions are:
	
Does anyone know what could have gone wrong? How bad is it? Is it going to be 
easy to fix? What should I do to fix it? etc. etc.

If you don't think I can fix it, what would you suggest as a replacement? I 
want this to be a non-issue. I want it to always work, and besides regular 
updates and the occasional "checking the logs" type of thing, I don't want to 
have to think about it.

Should I throw some more money at a better machine (see the details of this 
one below) and run Smoothwall on it?

Should I just buy some sort of embedded product that'll do the same thing?

Any other advice? and....

	Why does this stuff always seem to happen on a Friday?

The machine is a used Compaq Deskpro 2000 Pentium 166 with 32 MB of RAM, a 500 
MB IDE drive, and two real-tek NICs. I believe I put the most current BIOS on 
there from the Compaq website as well, not that it makes a huge difference.

Thanks in advance,
russ