hi all,
I have an old pentium 3 pc with 96mbram gathering dust in a cupboard. It has occured to me that I could use this pc as an internet gateway and firewall to my main pc and hopefully as a web server to serve up content to my mobile phone such as my e-mail, java stuff etc. I have a 2mb downstream and 256kb upstream broadband connection and can request a static ip for free. I also have a few .co.uk domains that I can point to my static ip address. I know I could use apache for normal web stuff but is this the same for wap? more to the point will apache let me serve up file to my mobile? also I want to be able to constantly download my mail from my isp and spam filter & virus check it delete it from the isp's server but host it on my "server" so that I can download it either with my mobile or main pc which is xp/linux dual boot. Am i right in assuming I will need to setup samba on the linux box so that my windows box can access the net from it? I want to leave this little "server" running pretty much permanently so that's why I want it to be linux based. Is there any security issues with doing any of this? one final question, would it be feasable to actually in future host a website with this box? Just to recap, I don't need this p3 pc to do anything else but be a gateway/firewall and a web/mail server with "built in" spam and virus filters.
Thanks for your help, James.

Yes, apache can server wap pages as well. There is nothing special from the network point of view - it's just the wap files have different content than html files.

No problem, you will set up a mail server on this machine, together with spam and antivirus software, set up fetchmail which will download e-mail from your ISP server(s) and process it through your mail server.

No. You don't need samba for accessing the internet from your windows computer. Samba is useful if you wanted to use files stored on the linux machine disk from Windows.

All you need to be able to use the internet from your Windows PC through the linux gateway is to set up routing/NAT properly.

Just patch it regularly with security updates from the distribution vendor's site and use a firewall. You should be OK security-wise then.

No problem, install and configure apache and you are done.

thanks r0b0, much appreciated and off to the howto's I go. One final question though... any ideas where to look for the antivirus and anti spam software cos although I need to run it on linux I need it to filter the microsoft nasties. Cheers!

Hello,

for antivirus: I think ClamAV is the reference
for antispam: I think that the reference is spamassassin
for more soft do a search at freshmeat.net: http://freshmeat.net/

Oliv'