Which distro for a small laptop firewall?

I've just dug up an old laptop; a 486 DX/4 with a 680 MB hard drive and 24
MB of ram.

I figure that I can get a PCMCIA II-type ethernet card on ebay for a few
bucks and make a decent firewall out of this one.

Here's my restrictions:

It has no CD-ROM.
It has a parallel-port floppy that it can boot from.
It has two PCMCIA II slots; I have a network card for one and will get one
for the other if this works.

So....

I need a distro that will work with this beast. The distro must support
PCMCIA, and use at least 2.4 kernels so I can use iptables.

I've been to Distrowatch. So far, three bear out promise:

Devil-Linux <http://www.devil-linux.org>
IPCop <http://www.ipcop.org>
LUILUNX <http://www.masilla.org/luinux/>

I know the traditional way to do this is to try them all, but on a
486-DX4 the installs take all day....

So, any suggestions/experience/comments?

In comp.os.linux.networking, Captain Dondo wrote:
>I've just dug up an old laptop; a 486 DX/4 with a 680 MB hard drive and 24
>MB of ram.
>
>I figure that I can get a PCMCIA II-type ethernet card on ebay for a few
>bucks and make a decent firewall out of this one.
>
>Here's my restrictions:
>
>It has no CD-ROM.
>It has a parallel-port floppy that it can boot from.
>It has two PCMCIA II slots; I have a network card for one and will get one
>for the other if this works.
>
>So....
>
>I need a distro that will work with this beast. The distro must support
>PCMCIA, and use at least 2.4 kernels so I can use iptables.
>
>I've been to Distrowatch. So far, three bear out promise:
>
>Devil-Linux <http://www.devil-linux.org>
>IPCop <http://www.ipcop.org>
>LUILUNX <http://www.masilla.org/luinux/>
>
>I know the traditional way to do this is to try them all, but on a
>486-DX4 the installs take all day....
>
>So, any suggestions/experience/comments?

What about OpenBSD ?
Installs very easily from floppy, very secure and will run fine on a
486.
You might want to check http://www.openbsd.org/i386.html to see if your
ethernet card is supported.

--
Maurice

On 2005-01-22, Captain Dondo <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

> It has no CD-ROM.
> It has a parallel-port floppy that it can boot from.
> It has two PCMCIA II slots; I have a network card for one and will get one
> for the other if this works.
>
> So....
>
> I need a distro that will work with this beast. The distro must support
> PCMCIA, and use at least 2.4 kernels so I can use iptables.

I use Coyote-Linux floppy-based firewall, and am happy with it:

http://www.coyotelinux.com/products.php?Product=coyote

It doesn't need the hard-drive, so you can tell the BIOS to spin
it down (or just yank it out of there) for less noise/heat.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! ... the HIGHWAY
at is made out of LIME
visi.com JELLO and my HONDA is a
barbequeuedOYSTER! Yum!

Captain Dondo wrote:
> I've just dug up an old laptop; a 486 DX/4 with a 680 MB hard drive and 24
> MB of ram.
>
> I figure that I can get a PCMCIA II-type ethernet card on ebay for a few
> bucks and make a decent firewall out of this one.
[snip]
> So, any suggestions/experience/comments?

Until recently my firewall was a 486 running Debian/stable. With a
500MB hard drive it used less than 300MB. (Heck, my current firewall
has a 36GB disk but is still only using about 300MB of that, and I'm
sure I could get it down even smaller.)

I really like the security updates of Debian/stable for a firewall, too.

Plus, with it being a full-featured distro, there's plenty extra
software available if you need the computer to perform some other task
in a pinch.

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 08:13:19 -0800, Captain Dondo
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

I would suggest Debian.

Dan

On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 08:13:19 -0800, Captain Dondo wrote:

> I've just dug up an old laptop; a 486 DX/4 with a 680 MB hard drive and 24
> MB of ram.
>
> [...]
>
> So, any suggestions/experience/comments?

I use Bering, one of the branches of the LEAF project
http://leaf.sourceforge.net/ It is floppy-based, or you can burn it to CD
and boot from there if you want. No HDD needed. As for firewall, it comes
with Shorewall.

HTH.

--
Jordi

Please replace nothing by anything to reply to my address.

> I use Bering, one of the branches of the LEAF project
> http://leaf.sourceforge.net/ It is floppy-based, or you can burn it to CD
> and boot from there if you want. No HDD needed. As for firewall, it comes
> with Shorewall.

* I think in other similar option: Linux Router Project
http://www.linuxrouter.org/
It' s also a floppy-based distro.

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