On Mon, 11 Nov 2002, Ed Wilts wrote: > On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 09:53:02AM -0800, jdow wrote: > > Tony, the best approach, from my experience, is to find a spare machine, > > say an old 75 MHz Pentium, and set it up with a pair of NICs as your > > firewall and network gateway using NAT. That will hide all your other > > serious machines behind some level of protection. This will allow for > > gadgets such as network printers and such. > > In my experience, that's the wrong answer. You're far better off, > long-term, to purchase one of those low-end home-oriented firewall boxes > like a Linksys cable/dsl router. You'll have one less system to manage > and it's a lot smaller with a lot less power, heat, and noise issues. i agree *completely* with this attitude. i'm baffled by the number of suggestions i've read that involve dragging an old pentium or 486 out of the closet, then probably having to add one or two network cards to it, installing linux on it, and having it do nothing more than act as a firewall. not to mention throwing off piles of excess, unnecessary heat, and waiting for its old hard drive to eventually fail (unless you poured even *more* money into it by giving it a new hard drive). far better to get a cable/dsl router (possibly 4-port), most of which are configurable via a browser. any decent one already has some firewalling capability, they're smaller, more reliable, do NAT automatically, etc, etc. sometimes, an old 486 doorstop is really just that -- a doorstop. rday -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
