[Darrel]
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.
I had problems installing recent SuSE on old hardware meant for firewalls, mainly because of insufficient memory, a bit because of obsolete graphic cards, but I remember having installed old SuSE's without much difficulty. Then, these old machines forever turn into no maintenance black boxes. It's only that they reboot slowly after an electrical outage. :-)
The old machine is a Pentium MMX 166mhz, 64MB RAM, 6.5 GB of HD space (2 drives).
Your old machines are much, much more powerful than my old machines! It seems that you do not need so much hardware to efficiently switch packets. Our users never noticed any difference when we use slow or fast hardware for firewalls. But I (personally) measured some better speed for massive transfers when I used ipchains rather than ipfwadm (yet these firewalls had more than one thousand rules). -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard