The nastiest thing about an old box as a firewall is getting the ISA network card recognized - apart from that, for a home network it should be fine. My firewall is a P100 running Smoothwall - it has been up for 150 days and doesn't miss a beat.
Nick Reese Linux earns mindshare, Microsoft buys it... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Jim Hague Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 1:34 AM To: Howard Lowndes Cc: SLUG; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [SLUG] Linux and Telstra ADSL On 21-Feb-2002 Howard Lowndes wrote: > On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Francois Haasbroek wrote: >> Every LUG that I visit has some stuff on using an old 486 as firewall. > > I think this concept is becoming a myth unless you want a REALLY > minimalist gateway box with almost bugger all firewalling and a POTS > modem, and are prepared to gut the kernel extensively. I don't think it's quite that bad. Until recently I had a 486 with a stock Debian Potato 2.2 kernel handling the cablemodem, the usual ipchains stuff (block these, masquerade that) and serving local web pages. It took an absolute age(*) for a apt-get install to complete, but it did work. Adding FreeS/WAN stressed it a bit - it took a while bringing the link up, but was OK otherwise. However, that was with a custom kernel (I need some patching on FreeS/WAN to cope with strangeness from the Ravlin box at the other end). OTOH, it is now a P120 (from 486/100) courtesy of a mate at work and it is much zippier. (*) This on the watched pots basis. Dunno what it was on wall time. -- Jim Hague - [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Work), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Play) Never trust a computer you can't lift or you don't control. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
