Routers

[Whipped]

I'm currently using the FreeSCO floppy disk based router package as my router. However, I'm starting to find it a little limiting as I want to add some more services onto my box.

I've a small 500 MB hard drive (Although I could liberate a bigger one) in this machine and was just wondering if anyone had a similar setup.

I was thinking along the lines of FreeBSD as the OS with the box running as a router, web server (php, mysql) and a small ftp server.

Any comments, suggestions?

 

[xane]

IpCop

 

[fatbusinessman]

Personally, I use SmoothWall - it's got a reasonable selection of features (based on a cut-down version of RedHat) but I'm finding its lack of a DNS server a tad annoying...

 

[lovedaddy]

My money would be on IPCop too, tho smoothwall is almost idential.

Ive heard good things about ClarkConnect too
http://www.clarkconnect.org/

Seems a little easier to hack things into it than IPCop/Smoothwall probably would be.

 

[Whipped]

Cheers guys, quite like the look of IpCop. Will give it a go this weekend.
Should have been giving it a go tonight, but two pints in the pub has taken it out of me <--- Wuss

 

[xane]

IPCop and Smoothwall were once the same, but have diverged now, with newer versions of both systems.

I went to IPCop because the IRC suppot people were a lot nicer to me and they have no intention of going commercial like Smoothwall has.

There are one or two IPCop modification sites out there, but be warned that every bit of software you install reduces the security a little, the idea is to have such a stripped down system that there is nothing for the hacker to exploit.

BTW IPCop 1.3 requires about 130MB + 2x RAM disk space, then again you wont need more than 128MB so a 500MB disk should be fine (mine is 425MB).

The only thing I've installed so far is a SNTP (Time) Server, the Client is already built into IPCop 1.3, so it synchs with an online site and then the rest of my LAN synchs with the IPCop machine

 

[wyrd_fish]

we have a BB router as well as a linux box running SmoothWall

thats all i know about it, as my dad set it up

 

[Deadnala]

i had one server based on linux suse, its not verry hard to set it up but iptables (firewall) is a pain. in my case it was a router/gateway with apache, ftp, sendmail, i allso had X installed to have statistics in graphic without i had to telnet for the logs etc.
my best uptime was about 260 days

 

[Whipped]

IPCop installed and working fine. Certainly seems a lot better than FreeSCO. Gonna try out ClarkConnect next weekend as it seems like it will support a little more expansion than IPCop will.

 

[MrBlack]

It all depends how much tinkering you're prepared to do.

For ages I used Zone Alarm (Free version) simply because I couldn't be arsed to get my linux box going.

Then we got 2 PCs and ICS was a pain in the arse, especially through Zone Alarm. So I zapped this on Celeron 300 Dell Desktop with Debian and set up my own iptables firewall script and routing. I can do reverse NAT for hosting game servers on internal boxes when the mood takes me and I've stripped down the running services to just ssh listening on the external interface so I can connect in from work and my own playground apache server for internal use only. (just so no-one can ever see some of my abortions of PHP scripts )

It's a hugely versatile solution, but it does take a bit of work to get going. I confess to never having used any of the available packages that claim to do it for you. How much control do you get? Are they all freeware?