Firewall and Hardware questions

Jonathan Berry berryja at gmail.com
Wed Jan 12 05:25:27 UTC 2005


On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 00:01:50 -0500, Mathew S. Nowend
<mathew at swfla.rr.com> wrote:
> Hello Everyone, 
> It has been a long while since I have been on, and I again I am in need of
> guidance. 
> I am currently running a WIFI network which includes a dell PIII 600 running
> XP pro, 
> A dell XPS laptop with XP pro, and a Celeron 600 custom box.  My original
> plan 
> Was to turn the custom box into a firewall/online storage/webserver.  If all
> of that is 
> Possible from one box.  I went to www.tldp.org and downloaded the .pdf 
> about 

Sure, it is certainly possible.  Often, though, for a firewall, you
want a minial system so that if someone does break into it, they can't
do much.  Also allows fewer inlets into the system.  But, if you want
to do this, it's probably not that big of a risk.

> Bridge+firewall+DSL howto.  From my understanding DSL/Cable are the same
> thing. 

No, they are different, but if your modem hooks up to your computer
via an ethernet port, you should be able to treat them the same.

> It does not say anything about what flavor of Linux to use, That is one
> question. 

Which one do you want to use?  Your on the Fedora mailing list, so FC3
is a good candidate, especially with the extra security of SELinux. 
Can make it more complicated, though.

> Second question is I know I need dual NICS' in the box but the custom
> machine 
> Stated above died. So I am replacing it and I just need to know if 512 RAM
> and 

512 MB is more than plenty for a firewall/webserver.  I have a
webserver running on an old PII box with 128 MB of RAM.  Memory is
cheap enough now, though, that I wouldn't build a computer with less
then 512 MB these days.  If you can save a significant amount, and
cost is a big issue, you could probably go with 256 MB.  More than 512
MB is probably excessive for what you say you want to do.  You can
always upgrade later if you need to.

> If I need to go with  a 40 or 80 gig hard drive?  Sorry if there was useless
> stuff surrounding 

Similarly, the 40 GB drive would be plenty.  The same webserver has a
10 GB hard disk.  Since you want this to be a storage server, you
might want the extra GBs.  It's up to you.  You'll probably actually
find the best deals somewhere around 160 GB or so.  Just look at your
prices (how much are you willing to spend?) and find the best price /
GB.  Again, you can upgrade later.

> The actual questions. 
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Mathew 

Jonathan

PS. Some people complain about people sending HTML mail to the list;
it's best to send plain text only.  Also, it seems yours ended up
double spaced, so whatever you did, didn't work out too well.




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