[ale] Diskless linux firewall?

[Thomas Stromberg]

On 2 jan 2006, at 12.07, Chris Woodfield wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Something I've been considering doing with my home system is figuring
> out a way to run my iptables firewall box without a hard drive.
> Currently it's a typical linux system running a minimal config -
> iptables rules, dhcpd, sshd, and ksysguardd for remote health
> monitoring.

While it's not Linux (it's FreeBSD), I highly recommend trying out  
m0n0BSD (http://www.m0n0.ch/bsd/) . It's designed to be a diskless  
firewall/wireless access point, with all configuration done through a  
very slick web interface. Interestingly enough, since a PHP interface  
is used as the management interface, they've decided to make most of  
the operating system configuration files as XML files. As a user,  
it's transparent to you.  I've currently got it installed on an 8MB  
CompactFlash card within a PC Engines WRAP box (http:// 
www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm). It's been running for 18 months without a  
hitch, and much simpler and easier to maintain than my previous  
attempt of rolling my own firewall on a CF card.

Even if you're dead-set to use Linux versus something else, I highly  
recommend giving m0n0BSD a spin.

P.S.: There is a "fork" of m0n0BSD that's based on FreeBSD 6.x called  
pfSense (http://www.pfsense.com/). I haven't yet tried it, but if  
you're looking into experimentation, it may be worth it.

// Thomas Str?mberg
// http://toadstool.se/
// +1 678 773 9475