DSL as home adsl gateway box?

Forum: Networking
Topic: DSL as home adsl gateway box?
started by: timrit

Posted by timrit on Mar. 18 2004,12:18

Hi. I don't know a great deal about linux, please excuse any n00bish lack of knowledge.
I'm looking at using a smallish linux distro on a spare p2 266 as an ADSL gateway/router thing for a smallish home network. Not having a sizeable spare hard drive for the machine I'd like it to run entirely off CD or (worst case) floppy.
How possible would it be to get a halfway secure (as or more secure than a winXP box running raspppoe and XP's builtin firewall) network-shared adsl connection going in damnsmall with little effort/knowledge/fuss? Or are there any distros out there that'd do this better?

Posted by Lee on Mar. 18 2004,13:19

Do you not have a spare HD at all?

I'm setting up my own webserver that will connect to my modem from NTL and my XP machine using a P1 200mhz with 128mb RAM and 2 HDs. One is 850mb which has a swap partition and ex2 with DSL installed and the other is 2ggb which is purely ex2 which I am intending to use a space for my website and services, maybe even programs like apache etc.

you use XPs firewall only

Your brave. I use Sygate on mine at the moment, and I'm looking into a Linux firewall and security systems.

I know most of this didn't help, but I asked some questions which will help us help you.

Posted by timrit on Mar. 18 2004,15:31

Heh, not really. Not without doing something funky involving reinstalling win2k and win98 on another machine, which'd result in freeing a whole 2gig. Not really worth the effort, especially considering it'd make the thing a whole lot noisier than a no-hdd setup.
I really don't think the average home DSL user needs super security. Or much security at all really. So you can get linux to be super secure, so *nothing* will get through... great. There're big corps out there that require that sort of security, but really, anything more than common sense and a basic firewall is overkill for anything at home.
It doesn't matter that linux is more secure than windows. if a plane flies, it flies; if all you want it to do is fly, then it doesn't matter how high it flies. (and i know very little about setting up security on anything linux; the higher you fly, the worse you crash...)
Ahem. sorry. (/rant)
Am thinking all I'd is a quick rundown on setting up a PPPoE connection in DSL, and a way to share that connection over the network, and some kind of firewall (peace of mind, if nothing else). Won't need DCHP. Does DSL have an uncomplicated firewall app at all? Failing that is there one i could download that DSL could load off a floppy disk or something whenever it needed?

Posted by Lee on Mar. 18 2004,21:38

I don't know of a firewall that can run in the RAM. But your going to need a fair bit to get anything running that you want from RAM I think.

I've just wiped my HD install of DSL, see if my modem works with another distro, then back to that if it doesn't.

Posted by brucewilcox on Mar. 18 2004,23:01

I've done very little with routers and firewalls, but I do recall running into several Linux projects done for that purpose, many of which run from a single floppy. For example:

< http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ >

Would something like this work for you? I see other options when I Google "linux router firewall floppy".

Posted by timrit on Mar. 19 2004,17:26

yeah. thanks everyone. damnsmall is a bit overkill lol
if anyone else has the same problem i did, i recommend coyote linux: < http://www.coyotelinux.com/products.php?Product=coyote >, runs a wizard in windows that builds a bootdisk image and everything for you! woot

don't even have to mess with linux guts to set it up.

just gotta find network cards it supports, but if you can do that it's awesome.

Posted by Smaug on Jan. 16 2006,13:16

A long time ago, I used a little Mandrake distro that was intended only for proxy+firewall
but it needed a hard disk to be installed....
it had not a GUI, but it worked really good in a pentium 233 with only 64Mb RAM, 500Mb hard disk, and two 3Com509 net cards .....
If I find the CD, I´ll gladly give You more info.

Posted by Grim on Jan. 17 2006,03:55

Cool, you found coyote before I could tell you about it.

If you ever want to try some other diskless routers:

< freesco >
< Linux Router Project (Dead, but groovy >
< LEAF >
< floppyfw >

Posted by AwPhuch on Jan. 17 2006,04:20

< How to setup Smoothwall 2.0 using a Compact Flash as a hard disk >

Wouldnt it be great to cross breed Damn Small Linux and SmoothWall Express 2.0....It could be Damn Small SmoothWall

Anyone wanna help me with it?

Brian
AwPhuch