Fast Home firewall - Best Setup?

daveteusink · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 41

Guys,
I'd like your help/opinion. I am getting ready to setup a home firewall. What I'd like is something that can run from a RAM Disk (So when a request is made. Its instant. No HD spinning up). My machine is old and slow but has 512M of RAM in it. The functions I'd like this firewall to do are heavy. I would like it to be first and foremost a firewall. Seconly I'd like to to be running BIND or some other DNS Server so that I can have multiple servers on my internal network working by domain name. Finally I want it to be able to Forward requests through to a different server on the network running Apache with a few virtual servers setup. This combination of tricks is a bit beyond my skill lvl of basic system setup and basic server security. Any Advices/Guides, Or helpful hits are very much welcome.

nivek98 · n00b Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 37

You could probably build a Gentoo LiveCD that would do this, however that's not something I have much info on. What I have heard of is this Router LiveCD that should do what you need. It says it supports DNS caching, however what I do not know is if it uses BIND to accomplish this or not. In most cases DNS does not have to run on your firewall/router/etc box, unless you have some special needs.

http://www.wifi.com.ar/english/cdrouter.html

-Nivek98

daveteusink · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2004 Posts: 41

Really the box will be an all purpose gateway. I know I could go with something like SmoothWall but I really enjoy gentoo. Plus I want the ability to run DNS So my Internal servers which wont be domain registerd on the web will come up on my network at home. I guess I can learn most of this BIND stuff on my own I'm just really looking for a way to have the whole system cached into RAM. I'll only need a few programs on the system at the moment. Maybe in the future I'll build a Web Front end to the system but for now SSH will work fine. The CD idea is ok but again. I dont want to have to wait while something in the system spins up. I know I can make BIND Cache somehow I'd imagine but for overall system preformance I'd like to get the most of the system in to RAM as possible. This is the basics of how a normal Router works. unzipping the filesystem to a ramdisk then running from there. The only thing I'm doing on top of that is setting a dns server for use with my internal network only. This way I'm hoping the DHCP will give MY dns server to the PC's so no Static DNS or IPs are needed.