I am pretty intrigued by Smoothwall and I'd like to build my own firewall machine using it. I don't have a surplus box to use though, so I'm going to need to buy one. Obviously I don't want to blow ridiculous money on something way more powerful than I need, but at the same time, I don't want to buy something that is so low end that it struggles constantly, even though it technically might work. I guess all I really am looking for is advice on the CPU, RAM, and disk space. If a 486 with 8 Mg RAM and a 200 Mg drive is all I really need, that's cool, but if a Pentium 133 with 64 Mg RAM and a 1 G disk would give me 10 times the performance, I'd rather go with it.

As a side question, are there any *technical* disadvantages to Smoothwall compared with IPCop? I'm not interested in the philosophical "Smoothwall has a corporate version so the developers sold their souls", etc stuff, but if there are objective advantages for one vs the other, I'd be interested in learning. Any input welcome. Thanks -- J.W.

I use it on a p133 with 32mb of ram and a 1gb hdd. It runs fine. I've heard of it running on 486's but I don't have one or I would have tried.

Out of curiosity, how much effort was it to install Smoothwall? -- J.W.

So... did you try Smoothwall?
I use it on an old 486DX (100mhz) machine, 240MB harddrive, 48Meg memory, an old matrox graphics card (I think) and a 14 inch monitor and I access the internet via an external Zoom 56K modem. (although I just ordered dsl from sprint/earthlink... I hope they don't get out here and say, 'hey! you're too far away', after their web page said it was available.)
The only thing bad is that the machine is not bootable from the CD, so I have to make install floppies. After that, it's 'smooth' sailing. I leave it on all the time. I recently installed the Beta 7 Pendolino release and just downloaded, but haven't yet installed, the official Smoothwall Express 2.0 release.
www.smoothwall.org.