StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Being that Linksys is approximately The Devil, I'm gnagging an old box and putting Fedora 3 on it to do a Real Geek's replacement. Any advice on likely snags and such? Anyone tried something similar? Admittedly, it's excesive, but it sounds fun.

You can manually set Fedora up to do it, but a far smoother way would be to get Freesco (which I use) or Smoothwall, another Linux distro for firewall purposes.

Smoother, perhaps, but I also want to take the opportunity to toy with Linux and get a better feel for it. Dual-purpose, as it were. Still, if I get annoyed and such, I'll keep those links in mind.

Honestly, there are better ways IMO to learn Linux than to set up your own firewall, as goofing up with the firewall can leave you without a connection period or let in malicious traffic.

The main thing I would suggest doing is learning how to use iptables. You'll have to create a number of manual rules. Alternately, you could install Shorewall (aka the Shorline Firewall) and use that to administer the iptables rules.

Well, I have a limitted supply of computer hardware, and an even more limitted supply of space to put more computer hardware, so my options are limitted.

Use Smoothwall or m0n0wall to do this.

Hm....I see that m0n0wall does, but does Smoothwall have NAT, or is it a pure firewall?

White Haven wrote:Hm....I see that m0n0wall does, but does Smoothwall have NAT, or is it a pure firewall?

I haven't personally run Smoothwall, but Linux has built-in NAT features (part of the kernel IP layer). I know that Freesco, which can run off a floppy disk, has firewalling, NAT, and a number of services, even a simple Web server...

The box has two hard drives, so I'll probably toss Fedora on one, and one of the dedicated firewall builds on the other, that way I can play with it and have a fall-back to keep the network up if I bork it.