building a firewall

[Jeff Claunch]

I'd go with FreeBSD myself using IPFilter.  :)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Hutchins" <hutchins at opus1.com>
To: "'Kurt Kessler'" <kessler2k at yahoo.com>; <kclug at kclug.org>
Sent: Friday, July 26, 2002 9:49 PM
Subject: RE: building a firewall

> -----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.
>
>
>