router distro

madchaz · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 2:25 am Post subject: router distro

ok. Just inherited an old 486 DX66 with a 500Mgs hard drive and 32mgs of ram.

I'd like to use it as a router. I only have ADSL so I think it can handle the load and that's about all it can be used as ;-)

now, I love gentoo, don't get me wrong, but well ... emmm... the tought of compiling ANYTHING, even a kernel, on that thing is a rather large turn off. I guess I don't like the idea of spending 4 days compiling the kernel.

I'm looking at "all in one" router distributions. I looked at smoothwall and it looks good, but I was wondering if anyone as any other idea/recomendation.

what I need

1: low resource need. machine's small
2: easy to make it "dial" my adsl. I need my mom to be able to do it if I ain't here.

O, btw, the thing as a CD-rom but won't boot of it, so have to be able to boot off a floppy.

edit: o yea. my connection as a max 180KB/sec download.
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MJN222 · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 4:32 am Post subject:

There was (at one point in time) the linux router project somewhere on the net. I think it forked off into LEAF or something similar sounding. Those are both pretty nice (boot off a floppy or a burned cd, iirc). google is your friend.

But seriously though, if you want to set up a router/firewall, go with openbsd. Its pretty much the best thing around for that sort of thing, imo.
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olal · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 6:38 am Post subject:

Hi

I used fli4l (http://www.fli4l.de/) on my old P100 laptop (2 PCMCIA nics) & it worked really well.

The docs was unfortunatly german-only when i used it, but it might have changed..

.o

irasnyd · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 7:55 am Post subject:

I use smoothwall currently (I use 2.0beta5 right now, but I used the 1.0 release in the past). Smoothwall has always worked really well for me.

Recently though, I have tried a FreeBSD based distro called m0n0wall. It seems to run much faster (not in terms of network throughput, but in terms of how the actual machine runs) than smoothwall, and it seems to be better secured (via my own portscanning and testing).

One thing that really makes it nice compared to smoothwall is that there is an option to forward ipv6 packets through the firewall, which smoothwall blocks by default.

www.smoothwall.org
www.m0n0.ch/wall

Jimboberella · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 7:59 am Post subject:

Frazierwall was my pick when I was doing this. Coyote linux was also good.

All single disk floppy based routers on the now defunct LRP (linux router project)

MrPyro · Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2003 12:10 pm Post subject:

Smoothwall is pretty good. We had it running on our internet router in the house I used to live in, and the guy who set it up (cos we were a whole house of Linux geeks) said it was great to set up, picked up the ADSL modem straight away (we'd had some problems using the Gentoo pppoed stuff) and has a very nice web interface to set up prot forwarding and other little net things.
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GMFTatsujin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 30 Jan 2003 Posts: 104

I'd love to run a floppy-based router (Freesco has done me right in the past) but I've found that it's hard to keep them up-to-date with device drivers. In fact, I've got a Freesco machine (PII, 32MB Ram, etc) that I'm going to have to drop soon, since I just got a wireless card that Freesco doesn't support. The problem is, I don't have anything to replace it with.

So the upshot is: One of my criteria for a floppy-based router is that I must be able to download and install new device drivers, either from source, or in easy-to-make modules. Last time I looked, Freesco was stuck with a 2.2 kernel... blah. Until then, I'll just have to put a *really* slim Gentoo on it. :)

squirrel · n00b Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 20

Don't forget IPCop, it's a fork of the Smoothwall Project. In some ways it's more advanced than Smoothwall GPL, though. For example, the 1.31 version will have traffic shaping courtesy of Wondershaper. 1.31 is in Alpha 4 stage now I think.

The only thing that bothers me about IPCop is that the community boards are full of stuff like "How do I install emule on IPCop?" and "How do I install Samba on IPcop?"

Duh. It's a firewall distro. You DON'T install those things on your firewall.

I digress. The base IPCop distro is very secure, easy to manage, and easy to setup.