[Wolves] Linux firewall in 16MB ?

[chris procter]

> Before I put in any more effort learning a new
> flavour of Unix, can 
> anyone suggest a sensible Linux config. or tell any
> reason why OpenBSD 
> would be a bad choice? 

Personnally I like OpenBSD and as a firewall its one
of the best choices out there because they've put a
lot of development work into making it so, iirc at
least one commercially available firewall uses OpenBSD
as its operating system. Its firewall software (pf) is
different from linux's though so you'll have to spend
some time learning about it
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/index.html has a user guide
that should help.

As a workstation its limited by software availability
but it depends what you want to do, you may struggle
with Java support for example, but gcc, apache, php
etc are available. You can get Bash from the packages
collection (its on the cd or downloadable from
www.openbsd.org) and  KDE/Gnome are available as well
(although thinking about it ice ages will come and go
before they start up on a 486) certainly Windowmaker
is in the packages and runs nicely on my 233MHz 64Mb
machine under OpenBSD 3.5. Anything that isn't
available natively can in theory be run using its
Linux compatability mode, although I havn't managed to
get java to do anything more the crash using it yet.

Personnally I think learning the BSD way is well worth
it, it certainly gives you a good view of whats right
and wrong with the Linux way of doing things. The BSDs
have a different culture to Linux and as we all know
travel broadens the mind :-)

chris 



	
	
		
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