Can anyone suggest me a good, cheap and small machine (computer) for a firewall?
Fedora, Red Hat or Ubuntu or......???
Motherboard Intel or AMD???
Processor???
I don not need floppy, CD, I think. Do you agree??

Suggest me a good configuration

Depends on what you mean by "firewall". If you mean you only want to run Netfilter/iptables on it, then pretty much anything you find with two or more NICs can work. If you intend to run more than Netfilter/iptables, then please specify what that would be so people can know more or less what the hardware requirements are. You'll also want to let us know how many clients and how much traffic will be going through this box (ballpark figures are okay). BTW, if you intend to run lots of different gateway/firewall apps, you might be happier with a specialized firewall distro (IPCop, etc.) instead of generic distros like Fedora or Ubuntu.

PS: My current GNU/Linux firewall is a box with a 216Mhz CPU / 16MB RAM / 4MB of ROM.

I want this machine for:
Shorewall - Firewall
Mail - But only for gateway. Without mailboxes
Web - One Web site - Some html pages

In the internal network there are ten users.

In that case then anything that meets the minimum hardware requirements of the distro you choose will suffice. It doesn't really matter whether you use an AMD or Intel CPU/motherboard - pick whatever you like best, just try to verify Linux compatibility of the components before making an investment. As for the CD-ROM drive, if you do a hard disk install then you won't need it - although it's not a bad idea to have one in order to do integrity tests, repairs, etc. Same goes for the floppy disk drive.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...emRequirements

http://docs.fedoraproject.org//relea...pecific-x86-hw

Thanks a lot

What do you think about the software that I'm going to install??

Fedora Core 7
Shorewall
Sendmail
Apache

I guess that postfix is better than sendmail in gateway machines but I'm not sure, what do you think??


Suggest me a good configuration.

Yeah, Postfix would probably be a better choice IMHO.

BTW, I'm moving this to Linux - General, as it's not directly a security issue.

I would prefer to go with slackware and leave out all the X server, window manager packages etc. You should be able to get a fast small system up and running with no bloat.

Consider something secondhand, or, if you have an old computer hanging around doing nothing, consider that.

I'd want a CD/DVD, for convenience of getting software onto the machine, but there are other ways of doing this.