This collection of web pages is the stopping off point on the World Wide Web which documents the incredibly cool piece of security hardware that UUNET had designed and built to its own specifications, known as the LanGuardian. If you find a deficiency in this collection of documents, please contact the email address listed at the bottom of the page.
The LanGuardian is a hardware encryption device that UUNET Technologies Inc. designed and built internally to its specifications. There were two models made, the first generation machine (not discussed much here) and a sleeker, faster, rackmounted, second generation machine.
Both models use a Motorola 68LC040 central processing unit. Both models feature two DMA driven ethernets, a DMA driven SCSI bus, an on-board DES/3DES encryption chip, serial ports, a parallel port, and a floppy drive. The first generation machines also have three ISA expansion slots, as well as a total of eight asynchrous serial ports. The second generation machines have two asynchrous serial ports, and also have two T1/E1 speed synchronous serial ports, so it can be used as a leased line router. Both generations of hardware were available with SCSI hard disks, to allow for native software development. The first generation development machines also had SCSI QIC-150 tape drives, for backups and system upgrades. (The onboard system PROM could boot from tape drive.)
Both versions of the hardware run a port of the BSD/OS operating system. The units shipped to customer sites were stripped down versions of the system, generally without hard disks. The entire operating system image -- kernel, configuration files and user application were squeezed onto a single floppy disk.
An incredibly lame picture gallery exists of parts of a Languardian. Taken on a late summer night on the dining room table, these won't be the photos that win any photojournalist awards. On the other hand, some mediocre pictures are better than no pictures.
There is a brief history document available.
All the technical LanGuardian resources have been gathered into one location for easy reference. This is more a convenience for the people working on LanGuardian development projects than anyone else. Feel free to browse the information archive for these technical tidbits of yesteryear.