Operating Systems > Linux and UNIX
unix networking
voidmain:
Yes, 80 is plenty for firewall/dns/dhcp but depending on what you use your proxy for it might be a little light. My Squid is running at about 18MB right now and with the ad filter/redirectors it's pushing 30MB. That still should be plenty. Also for caching it's good for Squid to have plenty of disk space to work with. And my proxy/firewall is only a P100 w/128MB. It's actually not the wisest thing to run other services on your firewall box. To be the most secure you would have a machine dedicated to only firewall and masquerading. By rights you should have an inside machine acting as your proxy and web servers etc should be in a DMZ. But for home use this is pretty impractical. For home use the next best thing might be to set up an inside machine that does your proxy, dhcp, dns, etc and port forward the specific services you want to be public. But doing it all on your firewall and keeping your inside machines on off-net addresses (192.168.*.*,10.*.*.*, 172.*.*.*) is probably better than nothing. It's just that your firewall box will be more susceptible to being owned and if they own that box they have your inside machines as well.
Master of Reality:
quote:Originally posted by X11:
80megs is plenty of ram...
In fact i know people who have 486 8mb ram/ 200mb HDD
running Linux as a firewall/router/proxy
--- End quote ---
what version of linux is it though? I could get my hands on the earliest version of linux if I really wanted to, i bet it doesnt need very much space, i suspect it lacks most of the capabilities i need.
voidmain:
It doesn't matter if you are running Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake or any other version of Linux for that matter. They all run the same kernel source and apps. Sure they are all compiled with different default drivers installed but all it takes is a recompile and include only the necessary drivers and if you inlude more than necessary but compile your drivers as modules they do not require much memory if you only load them if necessary. Like I said, you should be able to find memory for an old machine for free so why not upgrade it? He said he wanted to use it as a proxy and I would not recommend running it on 32MB for this. You could do it with 80 with no problem though. In fact 64 should be enough.
And sure you can bring up a desktop and window manager in 128MB but if you are going to do any serious work you will not be very productive with 128MB unless you really take care to skimp where you can. When I use my Linux as a development desktop 512MB is pretty good but there have been times I wish I had more. I usually have many windows open, a few browsers, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase databases, httpd, and a big chunk taken up by VMware so I can test things from a Win client. I guess it depends on what you plan on doing with your desktop. If you only need a lightweight window manager, a browser window and a mail client, no databases or server services running then yes 128MB should do you just nicely. But don't complain to me when you want to start doing some more serious work and things are slow.
[ April 13, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
Master of Reality:
quote:Originally posted by VoidMain:
It doesn't matter if you are running Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake or any other version of Linux for that matter. They all run the same kernel source and apps. Sure they are all compiled with different default drivers installed but all it takes is a recompile and include only the necessary drivers and if you inlude more than necessary but compile your drivers as modules they do not require much memory if you only load them if necessary. Like I said, you should be able to find memory for an old machine for free so why not upgrade it? He said he wanted to use it as a proxy and I would not recommend running it on 32MB for this. You could do it with 80 with no problem though. In fact 64 should be enough.
And sure you can bring up a desktop and window manager in 128MB but if you are going to do any serious work you will not be very productive with 128MB unless you really take care to skimp where you can. When I use my Linux as a development desktop 512MB is pretty good but there have been times I wish I had more. I usually have many windows open, a few browsers, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase databases, httpd, and a big chunk taken up by VMware so I can test things from a Win client. I guess it depends on what you plan on doing with your desktop. If you only need a lightweight window manager, a browser window and a mail client, no databases or server services running then yes 128MB should do you just nicely. But don't complain to me when you want to start doing some more serious work and things are slow.
[ April 13, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]
--- End quote ---
this is my old computer, so i never use it for anything other than to serve the web to my parents and my main computer. hmmmm... i will try out some of this memory i just happen to have with me and see if i can get 32 MB, no window manager or anything other than just a proxy, ip masquerading and maybe a DHCP.
untz:
Master of Reality:
I really like freebsd for that task. I am running freebsd 4.5 on a 75mhz with 24M ram and it runs great.
Use IPFW for firewalling and NATD for the IPMasq. NATD can control any port forwarding you would want as well. I would read up on the handbook at http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html. It will show you how to setup your firewall and use natd.
I use isc-dhcp3-3.0.1.r6 as the DHCP server and it runs flawlessly. The config file is pretty self-explanatory. You can find it in /usr/ports/net.
Note that after your initial install you will need to add a few things to your kernel. This tripped me up for a while. Its in the documentation but I overlooked it.
Below is what I added to my kernel to make it all work. The handbook shows how to rebuild your kernel in it as well.
options IPFIREWALL #enable ipfw
options IPDIVERT #enable natd
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE #firewall logging
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=25 #protect syslog
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