Router/Firewall

[athlonxpguy]

I am looking for some suggestions for setting up a Linux box to serve solely for this purpose. I have IPCop and heard of another called SmoothWall.

Now, I have an old system that might be ideal for this.

K6-2 500mhz, AT mobo (Soyo) with no onboard USB, 256mb RAM

The reason I mention the lack of USB support onboard is because my DSL is through BT and they supplied me with a USB modem.

I know addon cards can work, but have heard there can be issues with older boards.

Any suggestions?

[Mead]

That setup is more than enough power for what you want. Im not sure about issues with pci usb expansion cards, but I know that IPCop and Smoothwall are very much alike as IPCop is a branch off of Smoothwall caused by a disagreement with the developer of Smoothwall. Ive never heard anything bad about smoothwall as a program just bad things about the dev which I have no first hand knowledge of. Id check out the forums for both distro's and see what impressions you get.

[quux]

netfilter and
snort ??

Overkill.

CC.

I'd stick two wires from your 220V into the modem's USB connection and tell them it fried your PC. Then you could tell them you need one w/ an RJ45 connection and not USB . . . of course for this to work, you might wanna make sure they have modems w/ RJ45 connectors.

Tell 'em you're running Windows NT and you can't use USB anymore.

[athlonxpguy]

Hehe..yeah, they would believe that

[strangerstill]

That system seems fine for a firewall/router, even overspecced! I've got a P180 running a firewall, router, Apache, POP3, IMAP, NFS server and SOCKS5 proxy and it works great! (running FreeBSD, but Smoothwall will be great as well)

I've never had any problems with USB cards myself, but you should check to see if your card and USB modem are supported in Linux: one site is http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/index.php

Good luck!

[athlonxpguy]

How would you compare FreeBSD to Linux? Is it hard to install and setup? I have 4.8 ISO's, and have been wanting to try it out. Also, what mail server are you using? Qmail, Postfix or Sendmail?

What I was eventually planning on doing is use IPcop or Smoothwall, and add three NICs - one for LAN, DMZ and WAN (ISP) and setup a server on the DMZ for hosting BF1942 and Raven Shield. Also, maybe a mail server.

Any opinions?

[SpookyEddy]

How would you compare FreeBSD to Linux? Is it hard to install and setup?

If you know your way around admining a Linux box then you shouldn't find it that hard to make the switch to any of the BSD flavours. I like OpenBSD myself as PF is a pleasure to work with.

Regards

ed

[Mead]

compared to IPCop and Smoothwall a bsd install is going to be fairly complicated, but not impossible

[implexant]

I'd suggest IPCop, a complete idiot can install it. Easy web based configuration also.

-Chris

[EDIT] BTW, IPCop does support most USB modems. You can check that out on their home page.