Linux Journal: Rolling Your Own Firewall

“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about firewall
appliances and how much of a pain they can be to use. Many of them
tend to be Windows-specific in various ways, or they don’t have all
the flexibility us Penguin-heads have come to know and love with
iptables. So, I decided to see exactly how much pain is involved in
rolling your own firewall.

“A visit to the scrap closet netted me a beautiful little
machine: a Dell 486D/50, with 16MB of RAM, an 854MB Western Digital
hard drive, a floppy and a 3Com 3C509 NIC. Add to that a Viking
V.90 external modem, a second-hand 14” monitor and a keyboard to do
the install with (the sticker on the monitor says $29.95), and
we’re ready to rip.

“With all that hard drive space sitting there (you, in the back,
stop snickering), I thought I’d go for something a little more
powerful than your average floppy-based distribution. Indeed, I
fired up LEAF for a few minutes, but realized I wanted a bit
more…”

Complete
Story