I have an old Intel-based firewall box that used to run some flavor of BSD. It has multiple ethers, a CD-ROM drive and a single hard drive.

I'm trying to determine what Linux distro would be best to build a boot-and-run-from-CD-only image for this box. I want to pre-define the network nterfaces, setup Apache and a few static pages. Once the CD is created and verified that it runs on the hardware I'll disconnect the hard drive.

This will be an occasional use box for when the production webservers are down and I'd like to have a decent "Sorry, website temporarily unavailable" type of web page to greet them. Since it runs from CD only I don't have to worry (as much) about it being hacked/defaced - a reboot will clear it.

I'm thinking that I'd install the distro on the hard drive in order to tailor the build for the hardware on the box, create an image, FTP the image to another box, burn image to CD, then boot it up on the target box.

Any suggestions which distro to use? I don't need to run a desktop GUI or any other user baggage - just a webserver and be able to connect to the serial console. Of course, IPCHAINS or IPTABLES would be nice to limit traffic to port 80 and 443 only.

Thanks!

any distro that can be run off of a live CD should work for you. if you are skilled enough in linux to accomplish a task like this, then pick the distro you know best and figure out how others have made live CDs from your type of distro.

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with the term live cd and using that I've been able to dig up some items, e.g. for Fedora:

h t t p : / / t i n y u r l . c o m / 9 a v t 6

(Remove spaces from the above URL... since I'm a newb forum user I'm not permitted to post a URL)

The above URL referers to a page on 'Live CD Creation' which is part of the docs at fedora dot redhat dot com in the section Stateless Linux Tutorial.