hey guys, I want to setup a computer for a firewall, I heard 486's are good but i heard its hard to setup NICs on them? Well anyways I was just wondering what kind of NICS are Ideal for a Firewall machine...I have three Identical Nics Laying around that are made by Kingston they are PCI.(will these work?) also what verion of linux should I put on it and how should i set it up? thanks for any help...
Stimm

I don't know alot about networking, so I am not sure about the cards but I don't see why not. As far as a good distro for a firewall on a low spec machine I would recomend Smoothwall. It is a small Linux distro, designed for comps at 486 to be used as a firewall. You can find their website at http://www.smoothwall.org

Hi Stimm.
I'm no expert on anything linux, but I think the real problems start when using ISA pnp cards.
If you have PCI slots in there, I guess it's a lot easier.
To get an ISA nic working on this old 486 I'm using, I had to use the utility that came with the nic to turn off pnp.
Then I chose the address and IRQ manually.
Mind you, I did this before the install, and so I guess that made it less likely to have conflicts.

I run Red Hat 7.0
486 DX2 66, 12 meg RAM
IPchains
Never complains !!

Wazza

[Edited by Wazza on 03-13-2001 at 03:54 AM]

Well...i don`t know if this can help but for the OS you can go to http://www.freesco.org.. With the software, which fits on a floppy disk, you can set a router, a brdge, dhcp server, time server, DNS server, proxy etc...It may not be what you are looking for but it`s worth to check it out..and it`s free!!