down to the core

[Steve Melo]

Greetings,   I'm looking to build a system that will be a dedicated firewall machine. I would like this installation to be secure from the ground up and was hoping that someone could recommend a customized kernel package built specifically for firewalling.  The reason I'm asking is because just recently I tried using the ulog feature only to find that it is not supported by my kernel.  So I figured if I'm going to build a new kernel, what other enhancements can I make?    I don't know much about kernel patches either so excuse me if this is a dumb question:  Are there any patches that would give me additional functionality related to firewalling?     Thank you all,   steve