I am fairly new to networking and need a little input from those in the know. I have been contemplating configuring an old machine to handle firewall/mail type functions and then forward traffic to my main workstation. I will load 8.2 on both machines. My questions are whether the experts on this list think that my old machine is powerful enough to handle this task. The old machine is a Pentium MMX 166mhz, 64MB RAM, 6.5 GB of HD space (2 drives). Will this handle a stripped down installation of SuSE 8.2 and handle SuSEfirewall2 and possibly a proxy server????
Certainly, I just did this with a very similar machine, actually I think it was even "slower" than yours. Though I installed Debian instead and just used the 2.4.20 kernel iptables as my firewall. Debian has a very easy floppy network install that I'm comfortable with otherwise I would have used SuSE.
Also, my understanding is that I will need two NICs in this box: one for the DSL connection, the other for relaying traffic to my WS. Is this correct?
Precisely. Couple things to keep in mind. If you can avoid it, install as little as possible on your firewall. You can probably live without X and a compiler. If you go without X though, you'll have to do a lot of stuff by hand from a console. Also, if you are running servers on your internal network, I found that I had to use NAT (network address translation) in order to properly forward packets to/from the servers. Have fun, Josh