What do I need to setup a linux firewall on a 486?

[LordSandman]

I've got a 486 DX2 50Mhz I think. Is this enough horsepower for a linux router/firewall with NAT? How much ram do I need? I've never setup linux to do this. I've only installed linux about 4 or 5 times. What would the best Distro of linux be?

I'm currently using win2k Server for routing, but I also have fileservices running on the same server. It's not very secure, and I would like to fix this as cheap as I can. I also have a few pentium 75s around that I could use if the 486 didn't have enough power, but would like to save them for something else.

I also need to be able to do some port mapping, and it can't cause muc hof a performance impact because I would like to have at least 2 machines behind the firewall connecting to UT servers outside the firewall.

Any opinions are appreciated.

[dekemoose]

You could successfully run Linux on a 486 easily, with I believe as little as 4MB of memory, of course the more resources you ahve the better your performance, I should think if you could give it 32MB of memory it would be more than adequate. I like Red Hat, it's what I'm used to, but IP Chains can be run from, I believe, any distribution, it's compiled into the kernel. For more info check the archives for IP Chains, or the new version, IP Tables questions. Additionally, there is the IP Chains HOW-TO: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/IPCHAINS-HOWTO.html
You should be able to do it without much of an impact on the performance of your LAN.
Josh

[jumpedintothefire]

Mine is a sx25 with 20 meg of ram. I used RH on it with a "text mode" install. I picked the packages that I thought I needed. I played a little sneaky, I have small 40 meg dos drive as the master on the primary controller and a 2 gig as the master on the secondary. I installed lilo and can boot to dos, to run the dos setup programs for my nics that are stored there, just handy for me, I hate pissing with floppies more than once...

[bdg1983]

There are specific distros made just for being a router/nat/firewall.

Smoothwall is just one of them and has been featured in a couple of mags and also on download.com.

[LordSandman]

Thanks for the info, I'll try some of them out.

[Guitarlynn]

FreeSCO is easy and works well.
LRP is not as easy, but is more secure unless
you write your own custom script.

~Guitarlynn

[LordSandman]

Thanks Guitarlynn, I'm actually in the process of setting that one up. I got the link from Anandtech. http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=36&threadid=504735
I'm trying to figure out how to get the I/O port address and the IRQ# of the NICs for FreeSCO. I figured out the first 3com one by installing win95 or the 3com Cardinfo program. I don't have another 3com nic so I'm trying to install the 2nd NIC in win95, but it won't detect any of the nics I put in besides the 3com. Does anyone have any ideas on how to figure it out? I've got a RH 6.2 and 7.something boot disks. Are there any utilities on those that might help me figure it out?

Thanks

[Keyser Soze]

There is excellent documentation on the Freesco project on the web, it has the quick instruction set which contains info on how to do just that.