On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, George Bonser wrote: > On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, Mark Simos wrote: > > I am looking to put together a Debian based firewall and a mail server > > -how bad of an idea is it to host them on the same machine? > > (please explain how dumb it is, if so) > > > > How much power would I need (CPU/RAM/HD) to make it (or each of them) > > work? > > > > I just browse at home and download the occasional files and would like > > to learn how to configure various mail and firewall packages. not too > > much strain. > > > > Thanks! > > > > Mark > > Mark, I would not put the mail server on the firewall. This is because of > disk requirements. It is pretty easy for a lot of users on a machine to > fill up disk fairly quickly. About the only time I would put a mailer on a > firewall is for use as a transparent proxy to handle outbound mail or as a > relay machine for inbound mail to route it to your real mailhost. > > You do not need much in the way of CPU power. One method is to get a BUNCH > of RAM, create a bootable CDROM that boots initrd and runs from a > ramdisk. Set up syslog to log to a remote system that has a hard disk, > remove ALL hard disks from the system. Now if someone roots your box, you > just reboot and everything they did evaporates with the freshly loaded > binaries. Once you discover how they got in, you create another bootable > CDROM and reboot the box to load the more secure stuff. > > I would use ECC RAM in this configuration. Since logs are being sent to a > remote system, and since nothing is persistant over a reboot, and since > there are no hard disks to fail, you have a fairly secure and robust > firewall.
Do you have a link or know of a good book that describes how to do this? I'd love to give this a try at my house. Jesse