hi there

what distro would suffice my demands for

firewall+ethernet bridge+ssh

presenlty i have used mandrake 10.1 and suse 9.3

i would like to use some minimalistic distro
as i do not want to carry 5-6 Cds for this small task

I do not want to know about minimal linux distribution but some distributions that are specialy tailored for these tasks
last heard of smoothwall(smoothwall.org). will try that out

mandrake firewall is also another one

any more suggestions??

regards

Well, for distros specifically for the task, smoothwall it the one springs to mind as you mentioned. Have used that quite a bit to control intenet connections, routing, firewall + basic ids and provides ssh to the box. There are others, but that seems to be the most well-used. Other than that, a lot of people use a cut down version of Debian or Slackware for that kind of job. Only need the one CD as pretty everything will be installed off that, or pull the rest down automatically across the Internet. Not too hard to do, and gives you extra functionality at a later date. SuSE can be used for the kind of situation you're looking at, but needs stripping down a lot. Older version of SuSE would be fine, but are way out of dat (I'm thinking7.x here!). I used Mandrake firewall about 3 years ago and assume will have changed a lot now. Was okay, but nothing special.

I use SmoothWall Express for my firewall, but I have not discovered any bridge capability yet. Heck, the free version (Express) won't even do fail-over dial up.

If you're looking for compact firewall distros, check out LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall), esp. LEAF Bering-uClibc.

Yeah, you could use one of the firewall distros, but it can be more powerful to use Slackware or Debian. You can run other servers like apache or ProFTPD on there in the future.

thanks for ur suggetions

looks like smoothwall wil fulfill my needs for the present moment

regards

Let us know how it goes or if you need any help. SmoothWall is meant ot have pretty good documentation + support, so should get it going without too many problems.

smoothwall enterprise version does not looks to have support for bridging

i am looking into IPCOP

i have been working quite hard on this and I think if this too fails then i will go for Suse/mandrake with minimal packages

regards