building a firewall

[Jonathan Hutchins]

 -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Kessler [mailto:kessler2k at yahoo.com]

> I know this is like asking "which distro is best?",
> but, I have Mandrake Secure Network Firewall...

I played with it a couple of months ago, and my conclusion was "not ready
for prime time".  Not yet at least.  They have a GUI configuration tool
which sets everything up, but doesn't give you control over everything you
should have.

Besides which, don't even THINK of running a GUI on a 75MHz machine.

You will want a fairly "tight" distribution, current specs say minimum
100MHz for live NAT firewall that's doing nothing else.

That said, if you go with RedHat, the HOWTOs make it dead simple.  Do a
server install, select as little as possible, then go in and clean out what
you don't need.  Consider seriously compiling the kernel specifically for
that system, possibly doing the configure and compile on another box (I'm
not clear on that process myself, but I know it can be done).

Gentoo will probably be recommended to you, but you'll be all year compiling
it, and the HOWTOs generally address RedHat, then either Debian or
Slackwaer, with a nod to Mandrake.  For a beginner, I would go with the one
that has the most introductory info.