On Mon, Sep 22, 2003 at 06:00:35PM -0400, Franklin Maurer wrote:
Well i'm finally going to get high speed internet in the next few months. But i have a few questions...
Congrats :)
I'd like to turn one of my old computers into a dedicated firewall, would smoothwall or the SuSE firewall be a better choice?
Just thought I should mention it: LEAF/Bering (Shorewall) http://leaf.sourceforge.net/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=904&page_id=21 Boots off floppy or CD and lives in a ramdisk. Very nifty. I've never heard of any of these systems being 'rooted', but the ability to write protect the floppy (which is impossible with harddisks) gives me peace of mind. In that booting the machine *guarantees* that you get back to a known state. Lots of packages exist for LEAF, including f.x. ssh/shhd so you can access your fw securely from the net (which is my main reason to shun firewall-in-a-box solutions, since they all AFAIK use http/telnet with no possibility of encryption, which means you'll be transporting your root password in clear text... <brrr>)
The computer is a old piece of ... 100 Mhz pentium, 96 MB, 2 whopping 1g hardrives ... will this be sufficient?.
More than adequate. With LEAF you wouldn't need the disks, so you could save some power (and reduce noise) by ditching them. Alternatively (I'm building a machine like this ATM) one can use the disks as a logging 'archive', and spin them down with hdparm -Y when they're not in use. <rest snipped> Lots of goodies by other people on the rest. <goes back to lurking> HTH Jon Clausen -- Whatever rocks your boat!