[Sussex] Linux Firewall on a 50mg CD

[Mark Olliver]

Just looked at your suggestion Geoff, but GNATbox, looks to be all 
comercial.
I'm looking more at the gpl market.


I have considered Gentoo, but have never tried it and havent got a disk 
for it at the moment. I am going try today and see how small I can make 
a redhat install once i get rid of all the docs and extra's they through 
on even if you specify you dont want them. Hopefully this should bring 
it down to around the 100mg mark.

Thanks

Mark

Geoff Teale wrote:

>Mark wrote:
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>>Hi all
>>
>>Changed my subscirbed email address so i can now send plain 
>>text (if i 
>>remember).
>>    
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>
>Excellent - makes all the difference!
> 
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>
>>I looked yesturday at many small distro's however, their 
>>seams to be one 
>>common theme among them. They all use the 2.2.x kernel. I am 
>>looking at 
>>using the 2.4 kernel so that we can make use of the power of  
>>iptables. 
>>I am going to have a look at how easy it is to swop the 
>>kernel in ipcop 
>>and see if this works or not. If not i need to some how build 
>>a mini 2.4 
>>distro.
>>    
>>
>
>You might want to look at some of the non-install/CD boot disk distros -
>they are pretty easy to customise.  
>
>As an example (as only one of 3 CD bootable distros I've used)  Gentoo's 1.4
>boot disc (As used for the Unreal Tournament 2003 LiveCD) would boot you
>into a 2.4.19 kernel environment capable of doing everything you need.  You
>could adjust the disk so it was just your minimal environment and tool set
>and probably get it down to a very small image indeed.
>
>It wouldn't be too hard to put a scripted install from this build onto the
>disk (the LiveCD's are all fully functional install discs for Gentoo) if
>that's what you want - this saves having to  compile everything (which is
>how Gentoo works generally). 
>
>I guess there is also a chance that you may not want to put a hard drive in
>a firewall machine anyway (for added security) in which case these things
>are almost ideal.  GNATBox (NetBSD based methinks) works a bit like this but
>boots off a floppy disk (at least it did 4 years ago when I saw it)..
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