building a router/firewall

[Mike Lovell]

Joe C wrote:
> One small problem with that distro for the computer I'm supposed to do
> this with. it is only "Intel Pentium 3 733 Mhz, 512 MB RAM" which
> doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for 1-50 computers which is
> the range we are at right now.
>
> For those suggesting openWRT & DD-WRT I can't stand the idea of
> wasting that much HDD space. I'd rather run a full OS so I can have
> more features if I need to install one.
>   
even with a 'full OS', i'm guessing there is only going to be a couple 
hundred MB of space used (unless you're installing a GUI). and a lot of 
functionality can be fit in that couple hundred MB. unless you're 
planning on doing something else like running a file server, most of the 
space is going to go unused anyways. so why not use something that is 
meant to act run as a router? openwrt and dd-wrt do great at that. 
openwrt has a surprisingly large amount of packages available for it. 
stuff like asterisk, samba, openvpn, various routing tools, and more. 
http://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/trunk/x86/packages/ is a list of 
whats available in the snapshots. using it also gives you a nice web ui 
for controlling the core functionality.

another $.02

mike