On Tuesday 20 May 2003 3:22 pm, Darrell Cormier wrote:
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????
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?
Darrell, I have done similar, I am using a p166 96MB ram with 2 * 1000 MB of HD for a firewall-router. It is a fairly full install with KDE and konqueror, because it also had to earn its keep while I was doing a web project for college. IIRC I installed 8.0 [not 8.2] when it only had 64MB ram, so you may need to check the version compatibility for installing 8.2 with that little ram, as others have said - or if you could borrow a bit more for the install, you may be OK. I have 200MB swap and KDE System guard shows about 98% usage of physical and about 2% usage of swap. Once installed, configure to boot to runlevel 3 normally. Somewhere [I forget] you can configure that <Ctrl Alt Del> does shutdown, so you don't need to log in to init 0. I run KDE to configure and edit stuff, [BAD, but it doesn't stop me]. As a router, it is always ready to respond, and the mouse and keyboard always keep up. Disk is slow, so you may want to evaluate whether this would be a problem for mail offline. To my mind, Linux is well tuned for this type of use. Ping to my ISDN router is 1.6 - 1.7 ms with KDE and 1.4 ish ms without. The non GUI processes seem to carry on largely untouched by KDE, and the TCPIP never introduces any sort of noticeable delay. Even if the GUI is very slow, your keyboard and mouse are still very responsive and it is not as if you are actually configuring it frequently. As for 2 NIC's, it depends what you are using for your ADSL at the moment. You certainly need 2 network interfaces, but one of these could be an ADSL modem if you have one and a USB on your P166. If you have an ADSL router, then you will need an NIC and IMHO, if you are starting from scratch this is the way to do it, even though it means you will have 2 routers. And if you have more than 1 OS on your WS, this configuration is less overall hassle than having an ADSL modem on the workstation and confguring that for each OS. HTH Vince Littler