I have a Compaq Armada E500. It has a built in ethernet and I was wondering if I could use it for a firewall with a pcmcia ethernet card. Will Openbsd recognize it on bootup or does it have to have drivers configured for it to operate as my second network card?
Any help would be appreciated.

thanks!

You laptop doesn't appear to be on listed on http://www.openbsd.org/i386-laptop.html but that doesn't mean it won't work.

What kind of hardware your laptop has? OpenBSD has great laptop support so I would say it would work just fine.

Check that the hardware is supported from the OpenBSD website.

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <*BSD> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Thanks alot. I took a chance and purchased a Netgear pcmcia ethernet...worked great no problems at all. thanks!

Good to hear that. I haven't found an adapter yet that wouldn't work with OpenBSD. They have made great work with the network adapter support.

For those who need it, here's a link about this laptop. It sounds like an ideal FW platform. Have you added extra RAM?

Please report your progress configuring OpenBSD for this purpose. If were easy enough, I would strongly consider using OpenBSD for my perimeter FW. Up 'til now I have used SmoothWall because it's Linux based & therefore easy for me to administer. It's also pre- customized/configured as a FW. OTOH, OpenBSD's reputation for security impresses me, enough to consider a platform switch for this purpose.

Good Luck w/ this.

Archtoad6, if you want to make a good firewall then you really should go with OpenBSD. The PF is so easily configured. I had been struggling to understand IPTables on Linux but when I first saw PF I couldn't believe how simple it was.

There's nice info available for it on the OpenBSD site in here.

The thing is, I don't want to make a firewall at all, I especially don't want to be making the basics. I don't want to mess w/ iptables, I want a web interface that does that for me.

The parts I want to concentrate on are the filtering capabilities provided by dnsmasq & squid.

Do you know of any pre-configured firewalls that use OpenBSD for the underlying OS?

I doubt there are pre-configured openbsd firewalls. OpenBSD mentality is that the user must know how to admin the system.

I found one little bit out-dated live-CD which has some pre-configurations made.

And firewall builder seems to have support for OpenBSD's PF.

ha, found one pre-configured firewall, http://www.allard.nu/pfw/iso