Quote:
Originally posted by fireball
Hey guys! I Just bought an old pentium 2 box. I plan to make it into a firewall in the following configuration:
the coax cable comes out of the wall, into PC(firewall), out of second NIC into router, which swiches to 3 other comps.
I was just wondering which OS i should use for the firewall. Right now I am torn between Linix and Microsoft XP. I have the techlical now-how for Linix, but the potential lack of firewall options frightens me. Also, i am planning on running a web server and an FTP server off the firewall box. Maybie also Kazzaa, but that would be later, i think. Any other thoughts would be welcome as well
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please, dear god, dont use windows xp! sorry...just a little biased i suppose. personally i would say use openbsd (
http://www.openbsd.org); that is all i ever use for it. its a very small, stable, secure and FREE unix-like os, that has many great features for just such a device. i've used it for everything from file servers to web servers, routers, firewalls, various game servers, and more. openbsd.org has pretty good documentation, and there are quite a few other sites out there with good write-ups on using it for a router (bsdvault.net for example). system requirements for it are quite low as well (minimum of like 16mb of ram i believe, and just about any old processor). last time i had to reboot my router was about 2 months ago, and that was only because i recompiled the kernel and wanted to boot up using the new one. other than that i have never had a problem with it (only running a p2 300, 64mb ram, 2 nics and a 1gb hard drive).
one thing i would recommend you not do is run an ftp server (or allow telnet, for that matter) on your router/firewall, since ftp (and telnet) transfers passwords in clear text (non-excrypted) and there are a great many exploits for it. ssh/sftp, yo!
second to openbsd i would recommend either freebsd or slackware, and short of that some other flavor of linux, such as mandrake.
anyways, just my two cents. if you go with openbsd let me know if you would like any help configuring it. ill try to burn you an iso of if too if you want.