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View Full Version : Which OS for a firewall?

Richard M
27-07-2003, 01:18
Hi guys, I just got a couple of old PCs given to me.
One is an AMD K62 300 with 96MB which I plan to install Win 2000 on and use for my file downloading with eMule and things so I can play games with my main computer and still download stuff without system slowdown.

The other PC is a Pentium MMX 166 with 32MB of RAM which I want to use as some kind of router and firewall.

Both PCs have Windows ME at the moment but which OS would be best for the Pentium firewall machine and can anyone recommend software to do the job (or can it all be done within the OS)?

The choices for me are:

Leave as Windows ME (not a good idea really).
Install Windows 2000 (might struggle a bit but a good OS).
A Linux distro.

I also have Windows 3.11 and IBM OS 2.1 on floppy disks... :rofl:
Bifta
27-07-2003, 01:45
Download Smoothwall ISO from smoothwall.org, burn to a CD, set bios of the machine to boot from CD, start machine up with CD in drive, job done!
Richard M
27-07-2003, 02:30
That'll do nicely, thanks. :)
BenH
27-07-2003, 16:05
also take a look at SME server

http://www.e-smith.org/

and free bsd

http://www.freebsd.org/

Regards,

Ben
Jon T
27-07-2003, 17:00
Smoothwall is a nice and easy firewall o/s to set up and configure.

E-smith(sme server) is good if you want a web/ftp server built into your firewall machine.

Jon
Richard M
27-07-2003, 17:33
Originally posted by Jon T
Smoothwall is a nice and easy firewall o/s to set up and configure.

E-smith(sme server) is good if you want a web/ftp server built into your firewall machine.

Jon

I spent around 2 hours last night reading the manual for Smoothwall and I'm impressed, it's a cut down RedHat distro and looks excellent for the job.

I don't need a web server though because I've already got Apache with PHP and Perl running on another machine.
Dupre
27-07-2003, 17:52
my personal 2cents is SuSE linux :) does other stuff for you if you want it too, and a good solid distro, but requires fiddling for a while to get how you want it.
Defiant
27-07-2003, 18:31
With those kinda spec I'd go for Windows NT4 myself
ic14
27-07-2003, 18:36
Why windows? I dont think he wants to use a OS that is well known in hacking circles,

Smoothwall def looks good and if (when!) i get a new pc this one may end up being used for that purposie
BenH
27-07-2003, 19:10
Originally posted by Defiant
With those kinda spec I'd go for Windows NT4 myself

Do you dislike this person that much!! :D