Good setup for a firewall

[BioHaze]

Ok I am gonna build a new box strictly for firewall protection. I want a cheap setup so what type of cpu and equipment should I get since I dont really care about using this for anything else besides just as a firewall what do I need. Thanks

[The_Stack]

A few years ago, I used an old 386 with 8MB of RAM and a small 540MB harddrive as a firewall/masquerade box (installed Slackware on it).

[Strike]

I have a P233MMX with 128MB of RAM, and that's way too much. Without running SETI or distributed.net stuff, the load average is pretty much always under 0.1, usually more like 0.02.

[BioHaze]

I am also gonna be using Debian. Is this a good distro for this or what other recommendations would you suggest. I am open for all help since this will be my first at this.

[yvrich]

I think one of the smaller distros would be plenty. You don't need any bells and whistles, just a nice tight set of ipchains rules. No X, no browsers, just one editor, and so on.

Debian should be fine. Just tell it not to install anything except what you absolutely need.