486 as firewall, crappy or what?

[birdy]

Anyone know how good a 486 SX 33 would be as a firewall running smoothwall? I would want to play games through it and dont want to screw up my lovely LPB type pings when i get my cable modem.

[birdy]

it has a whole 12mb ram BTW

[dZeus]

hmm.... 10Mbps should not be too difficult for a 486

[Guru]

I assume you are going to use a linux selfboot floppy ver. if you are it will do!

[birdy]

that was the plan. I was just thinking that maybe it ould introduce more ping than really neccesary.

I think i will invest in a couple of ISA NICs and give it go.

I can see a few questions about 486s coming on. I know very little the old stuff. I think i know where to come though. Thanks guys

[birdy]

Where can i get a self boot floppy version of linux from?

I have been looking at smoothwall but that wants a load of hard drive space and recommends at least a 486DX4 with 16mb ram. I only have 12mb on a 486sx33 Smoothwall seems to want to do more than i need too. I dont want traffic stats, or a fancy web based admin console i just want to set it up one time and leave it.

Picky arent i?

[cbman]

Try at

http://www.linux.org

Under Possibly the following.

http://www.linux.org/dist/english.html

Just past halfway down the page they have a separate catagory for Mini and Specialty Distributions.

Hope that helps a little.

[Wombat]

Usually, people are looking for this project:

http://master-www.linuxrouter.org:8080/

Keep in mind that if you're a gamer, PCI NICs will probably give you better ping. Also, I'm not sure if the ISA bus will give you full bandwidth.

[superfly]

Well if i remember correctly,the isa bus can transfer a maximum of 16 meg/sec, so i don't think that bandwith should be the problem...


The main problem is that the isa protocol doesn't support bus mastering so all calls must go though the cpu first before being able to go anywhere else directly (like pci can).

[birdy]

i must admit i am starting to have doubts. I have to get a couple of ISA nics which should cost about 25 quid, there is no pci on the board at all. I have pci nics coming out of my ears so it may be cheaper for me to get a more powerful comp, something as powerful as a P60!! especially as i already have the hard drive, fdd, case keyboard and the rest all i need is a CPU, board and RAM unless i find one which will take SDRAM in which case i have that too.

Anyone here got some old gear they want to get rid of ?

You do have to be in the uk though

[Guru]

You actualy do not need more then the mobo, cpu, ram (8mb will do) a 1.44mb floppy, 2 nics, and a psu preferably "at"(case optional)! No need for a graphics card keyboard mouse graphics card monitor hd etc. The firewall prog will boot from a floppy and install itself on a ramdrive all you need to do is configure it once and make sure you configure the bios not to halt on keyboard errors and you will be fine!

BTW how fast is your internet conection?

[birdy]

my new modem will be 512kbps down 128kbps up

I am very much looking forward to having it too

If i am going to get another pc, say a p60 or something then i will install smoothwall. It does need a hard drive but i have an old 850mb quantum sitting around so it's no worries.

How can you boot a PC with no graphics card?

[Wombat]

Well, you might need to disable that error in the BIOS (so, maybe a video card at first). But think about the routers you can buy today. They're pretty much systems without video. You just telnet/ssh in to it.

[Colin Morey]

indeed you can, disable the error in the bios and boot it up, different OS's handle in different ways, (eg I have no idea what windows would say, could be fun
trying..)

Linux wil throw a lot of errors into your log files until you make a couple of changes, (hint look at /etc/inittab)

I'd point you to a site detailing nice mods you can make to smoothwall to squeeze it into a smaller box, but I'm still writing it,

(i believe smoothwall will run on less memory, but you will prolly want to make some changes to decrease the memory load)

Colin Morey.

[Guru]

Wombat Linux Router Project (LRP) n. was the one I was refering to! Thanx for posting the link!

birdy if you only have 512kbps line the cards do not have to do the full 10Mbit!