Re: Security on a home DSL Line
Otherwise, your idea is perfect; Linux or OpenBSD, whichever you're more comfortable with, will give you the most flexibility, and Solaris x86 might work but will be dog-slow and unless you have a lot of RAM, completely unusuable.
For such a weakly defined measure of "a lot of RAM", this statement is inaccurate. Solaris 8 x86 will run comfortably, without X and superfluous processes (to say: a rational firewall/NAT box configuration) within 12M of RAM. A passing knowledge of Solaris would not let a person know this to be true, however, since Sun states its memory requirements on the assumption you'd be using X. That being said, OpenBSD is probably the best choice. It requires more skill to install, but less skill to secure, and would probably run better *by default* on a minimal machine. After that I'd suggest Solaris, since it installs less crap than most of the Linux distributions (note: most). Driver issues might force your hand to the Linuxes, of course. I also place OpenBSD and Solaris above Linux because they both give you the use of IPFilter, which I believe to be just flat-out superior to IPChains. -- Brandon Hume - hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/ -> Solaris Snob and general NOCMonkey
Of course, for those that don't know how to install a OS without the use of GUIs, you can always install FreeBSD just about as easily as Linux, and have all the security of IPFilter over IPChains... I've used this method to do everything from a Dial on Demand NAT gateway, to a full fledged firewall/router solution. Of course, my home network is behind more sophisticated security now, but if/when I ever change jobs and network providers, I'll be going back to the FreeBSD firewall/NAT method. -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Brandon Hume Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 9:07 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Security on a home DSL Line
Otherwise, your idea is perfect; Linux or OpenBSD, whichever you're more comfortable with, will give you the most flexibility, and Solaris x86 might work but will be dog-slow and unless you have a lot of RAM, completely unusuable.
For such a weakly defined measure of "a lot of RAM", this statement is inaccurate. Solaris 8 x86 will run comfortably, without X and superfluous processes (to say: a rational firewall/NAT box configuration) within 12M of RAM. A passing knowledge of Solaris would not let a person know this to be true, however, since Sun states its memory requirements on the assumption you'd be using X. That being said, OpenBSD is probably the best choice. It requires more skill to install, but less skill to secure, and would probably run better *by default* on a minimal machine. After that I'd suggest Solaris, since it installs less crap than most of the Linux distributions (note: most). Driver issues might force your hand to the Linuxes, of course. I also place OpenBSD and Solaris above Linux because they both give you the use of IPFilter, which I believe to be just flat-out superior to IPChains. -- Brandon Hume - hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/ -> Solaris Snob and general NOCMonkey
participants (2)
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Brandon Hume -
Sean Figgins