Fedora as router

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-02-24 01:45pm

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.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2005-02-24 03:09pm

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.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-02-24 03:48pm

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.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2005-02-24 04:14pm

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.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-02-24 04:21pm

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.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-02-24 06:56pm

Use Smoothwall or m0n0wall to do this.

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-02-25 11:58am

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

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2005-02-25 01:30pm

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...

White Haven · Post by **White Haven** » 2005-02-25 02:06pm

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.