Hey guys, I want to know what software I should make my firewall with. I want to put an external 56k modem on it and maybe two or 3 nics on it to serve surfing boxes. Should they be 100 mb nics? Could I convert it to do off-line routing easily running on ram? Would it be good to use 32 meg of ram on the 486 box or should I just go with 8 or 16? I want it easy to configure as I am pretty new. I recall there is at least 1 floppy driven firwewall. And I will need to have something like kppp on it too, right? Or I could leave an old HD spinning in there if it's easier to do the routing option and have this a versatile box. I may just use a pentium box with a gui and 64 meg cause the 486's are wankers as they are. But I would like it quiet & more reliable..., i.e. no hd running. John

One modem and one nic should suffice, as for the speed of the nic, 10/100 mb won't matter with only a 56k connection. Offline routing I'm not sure on. The ram you use would depend on how many clients you'll have. But, generally, the more the better. The single floppy on a 486 setup will do it nicely. Go to www.linuxrouter.org/ for more info.

http://freesco.info FreeSCO is easy to set up quickly and simpler than LRP for newbies. Works great for most folks.

A 486 isn't fast enough for 100 mbps, it can barely handle 10 mbps. I'd say definitely go for 32 mb if you want to use a recent distrib (and a recent kernel). Using a gui with 32 mb is still doubtable I'd say, so I'd recommend console only.