While using a cable modem at home and Mandrake 6.1 I noticed a few things that I think could use a change. 1. The Installer for Mandrake 6.1 seems to be optimized for a machine that is on a private network and the default settings leave a bunch of potentially dangerous services going (like ftpd and telnetd). It would be nice if when selecting type of Installation (server, workstation, custom) if there was also an option for "Stand Alone / Private Network" and "Internet Connected" in a separate selection menu. 2. A more complete networking code and up to date documentation to go with it. I found that setting up a little Linux-Mandrake based firewall including such networking code as IP masquerading and packet filtering was not all that difficult once reading the docs. When I went to set up port forwarding I found the docs (IPCHAINS-HOWTO, Firewall-HOWTO, IPCHAINS man page, and kernel documentation) didn't have up to date info and pointed me in all of the wrong directions. I found some usable documentation at http://home.plutonium.net/~sjhill/mirrors/ipmasq/ipmasq-HOWTO-1.65-6.html. I installed the ipmasqadm-0.4.1-1.i386.rpm on my system and used that to set up port forwarding. 3. Strong crypto. I have noticed that at least in the past that Big Brother doesn't like the idea of having strong crypto coupled with an OS. When using a public network like the Internet and especially when reading docs on the Internet on how to spoof other cable modems on your segment I feel much more comfortable using something like SSH2 to transmit passwords over the Internet. With what I have heard about openssh 1.x and ssh 1.x, I don't feel all that comfortable using them. I compiled ssh 2.0.13 onto my systems and even though I have had some problems getting X to forward its ports transparently, I still feel more comfortable with it. (I find that after writing programs all day with a text editor at work, using the command line is pretty strait forward to me for some reason.)
