Is 24 MB enough RAM for a firewall?

[slacker_x]

Firewall will be a low end pentium or 486 running a 2.4.X kernel. The firewall is for my cable modem.

[Derango]

It should be...but I wouldent reccomend running a GUI on that machine...it would be slightly slow :)

[slacker_x]

ohh.....yeah.....NO WAY I would put X on that thing. I just wasn't sure how much a firewall would require.

[FoBoT]

yes, my firewall has 16mb, but only because the only 72 pin simm i had to fit the 486 mobo was a 16mb stick, just choose your weapon (OS) carefully!

good luck! :)

[evulish]

bare-bone :cool: debian :cool: or :) slack :) would be my recommendations for a nice 'weapon.'

[GuruWannabe]

I have 16MB on my firewall running FreeBSD.

[spickus]

I'm running a Slack 7.1 firewall/router on a 486dx with 20 megs RAM. It's serving SSH, Sendmail, DNS (caching), Apache and POP. It performs quite well although the POP server is not always lightning fast. It almost never uses swap.

[slacker_x]

Thanks all... I'm going to put debian on it....that is once it exists. I'm still trying to salvage hardware.