Re: [SLUG] Older i386 looking for buff firewall. Must know how to handle bad packets...

[John Ryland <jryland@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 28 November 2000 12:48, Matthew Dalton wrote:
> Ken Yap wrote:
> > You need enough memory to hold the ramdisk and to run the utilities that
> > configure the firewall, and have enough left over for the packet buffers.
> > Also as the ramdisk is often compressed to fit onto the floppy, you need
> > enough memory to run bunzip2 or gunzip.
>
> I found that Tom's rootboot disk doesn't run in 4Mb for the same reason
> - it needs the ramdisk.
>
> But, what if Aaron were to somehow 'install' a floppy-based distro to
> his 20Mb HDD? Has anyone tried doing anything like this before?

Yep, there are some distros that let you do that. I have an old laptop I 
bought on sold.com.au. I got 2 laptops for $150. The better one is a Colour 
Compaq Areo, 486SX33 with 4Mb of RAM. I can't remember what the single floppy 
disk thing was called, but it had an option to install to a UMSDOS filesystem 
which worked for me. It also had addon disks to expand it. I even got an 
X-Server running on the laptop in the 4Mb. (Acutally it may have been 
muLinux).

I refered to muLinux a lot when I pacakged a single floppy boot disk image 
that runs a qt/embedded demo. If anyone is interested you can get it by going 
to http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/embedded/qpe.html and following the 
link to boot disks at the bottom of the page.

Also at home I have a 486 which is my firewall to my bigpond cable 
connection. I used a single boot floppy distribution called coyote linux. It 
is based on the linux router project (LRP). I've modified the scripts that 
sets up the ipchains and added the bpalogin client to the floppy image so it 
logs in to the bigpond network and does IP masquerading. The 486 doesn't have 
a harddisk, just the floppy drive. Ofcourse that means I can't permanently 
keep any log files. However the 486 does have 8Mb or RAM so I didn't have to 
worry.

Maybe Aaron should have a look on ebay or sold for some cheap old RAM or a 
cheap old computer. How expensive can a 486 with 8Mb be? Even in the saturday 
paper I'm sure you can get them for under $100.

John