os selection

[copton]

hi
i want to establish a small linux server at home. its main tasks will be routing, logging and hosting the firewall.
i assembled several older hardware components such as an intel 486 and two harddisk with together 200mb. this should be enough, i thought.
but when installing the os (suse 7.1) i had a lack of about 700mb of harddisk space for the minimum installation!
then i tried linux-on-a-floppy distributions (e.g. the linux router project). but they did not really convince me as they are a little bit too small. a lot of usefull tools are missing.
could you please give me some advise in selecting the right os?
thx in advance

regards
copton

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Have you looked at the smoothwall distro ? It's designed specifically for firewalling/routing and you can administer it thru a web interface.

See -->

http://www.smoothwall.org/gpl/

Regards

 

[rycamor]

Try FreeBSD (

http://www.freebsd.org).

It has all the same great Unix programs and utilities as Linux, and it has a really organized menu-driven install process that lets you completely shape the size and purpose of your install. It tends to have much lower hardware requirements than Linux. I have gotten FreeBSD working just fine on a 486 with 400 MB hard disk space, and that was with Apache, MySQL and PHP, compiled from source.

For your purposes, FreeBSD has a very straightforward firewall/NAT program called 'ipfw'. I use it for firewalling and logging on my home. You will have to recompile your kernel, which takes a bit of reading (and probably half a day of compiling, on your hardware), but in so doing you can optimize it even better for your hardware. My current FreeBSD 4.2 kernel is only 2.2 MB, and that's with quite a few extra options enabled, including Linux compatibility.