On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Joe Cooper wrote:
> >I have an old P75 w/ a 512 mb hd and 16 mg ram and was wondering if this would
> >make a decent firewall/router or would I need more ram / hd?
<SNIP>
>
> Sounds like a perfect box for a router/firewall to me. Just don't
>bother running X on it.
>
<SNIP>
> You may want to consider one of the small micro-distros however (LRP,
> Trinux, etc.), as Red Hat these days even in a very small install takes
> nearly 500MB, which doesn't leave a lot of breathing room.
^^^^^
NO! The mimimal Red Hat install (custom, of course) with just enough
packages, services (plus a few extras that you might want to add)
comes to about 133 MB in my last install.
^^^^^^
That's may be too big for a few old 486 systems with 119 MB drives, but
certainly not for his P75 nor for most 486's!!! Of course you don't run X
on the box. About the only things you select are ipchains and dhcp (and
dhcpd), with dhcpcd, caching-nameserver optional (but recommended). Be
sure to check the "install to satisfy dependencies" box. (Note: if you
must do dialup instead of dsl or cable modem, you will need ppp, etc)
I'm in the process of stripping and repacking Red Hat so that it will fit
in the 100 MB drives directly via network install. (Maybe about 70 MB or
so?)
The advantage of the Red Hat install vs LRP, etc is flexibility.
There is a very large amount of traffic on the LPR list serve specifically
asking for someone to make them a module to do something. With very little
space, you have to be quite efficient. If you have a strange ethernet
card or you want to add a third segment or you want to do vpn or you want
to port forward something new or you want to do caching-nameserver and/or
sqid or you want to even run a web server (ugh!) my experience says that
Red Hat ip chains is much easier than LRP.
Also, security updates are quite easy if you stay vanilla Red Hat.
If you want, check out my ip masq web page for Red Hat:
http://www-jerry.oit.duke.edu/linux/bluedevil/ipchains_howto.html
***************************************************************************
Jerry Winegarden OIT/Technical Support Duke University
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www-jerry.oit.duke.edu
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