On Thursday 19 January 2006 01:20 IST, Nigel Henry wrote: > > 2) Internet sharing and firewall. Protection as required. > > I use Smoothwall Express2, soon to be upgraded to Express3 (just in Alpha > at the moment). This can be installed on an old machine. I use it on a > 100Mhz, 32MB RAM, I Ghz harddrive machine, but would suggest something > perhaps a bit faster, with perhaps 128 to 256 MB RAM, and a bigger > harddrive. It is secure, and handles NAT (Internet sharing). You can also > setup a DMZ (demiliterized zone) where you can keep your Internet > accessable webserver, ftpserver, mailserver, etc, keeping them separate > from your LAN. Connection to the Internet is either by serial modem (not > much use if your running a webserver), or ethernet connection to an ADSL > router/modem. I believe USB router/modems are a problem with Linux. Also, > and perhaps I'm a bit paranoid, but I also have Guarddog, a GUI for > IPtables packet filtering firewall on all my client machines. This > enables you to also block selectively, outgoing ports. Of course, most > router/modems have built in firewalls, but make sure you get one that has > connection to your ethernet connection, rather than USB. Again I'm not > sure of the connections. You probably just need to connect it to the > uplink on your ethernet switch. Thanks for the reference Nigel. I briefly went through the smoothwall site and it seems good. I am however, concerned that it is not just a software installation on linux but installs with linux. This would probably alright but then it seems that the kernel is an old one. I am particularly concerned as i do wish to have other software installed on the server but may be faced with compatibility problem with the older version of linux in place. I know i will have a subversion server running on it. Or is this all not really a problem at all? I do not mind putting up a higher config for the server. I could make my existing PC; an AMD64 3000+ with 1Gig of RAM be the server while i personally use a laptop. > > 3) Connecting to the local network from outside over the internet and > > acessing it like it were local. > > The Smoothwall will also handle port forwarding so that your client > machines can also be accessed from the Internet. Obviously your ISP will > have to have provided you with a static IP address for this to work. > Otherwise you will have to subscribe to someone like no-ip, if you only > have a dynamic IP address from your ISP. I have had heard of no-ip but never used it. Will smoothwall make it easy to setup and provide good guidelines on connecting over the internet? I have not had prior experience with stuff like VPN etc. which i think is *the* way to do it(?). > There are other hardware firewalls, IPcop for instance, and Firestarter > (available from Sourceforge) is comparable to Guarddog. There are also > many others, apart from no-ip offering web redirection. Nigel. Gaurdog is already on my list! :-) -- Cheers! kitts ___________________________________________________ . Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.