I am looking for a small linux which will run shorewall. I have used this firewall for sometime with much success. I only boot the system to run level 3. I am looking for a very small linux to run this. I would like to burn an image to a flash system to build firewall. I have been using Redhat 8.0 but, it is over kill for just IP tables. I have looked at smoothwall but I like shorewall better.

Could someone point me to a light weight linux to build firewalls. All I need is sshd for remote shell and that is about it.

Thanks

have you tried ipcop? it's a smoothwall fork with a LOT of more functionality than Smoothwall Express. As for a small distro... DamnSmall Linux would do you fine i'd guess.

Have you checked out Linux Embedded Appliance Firewall (LEAF) ? In particular, the uClibc branch. Already comes with shorewall as part of the base distro.

FWIW: I run this distro (with shorewall) on a P100 with just three NICS and two floppy drives, but I know there are links on the website on howto burn CD/Flash images.

Also check out m0n0wall. A complete installation is less than 8MB, so it easily runs from a CF card. It doesn't have SSH, but all configuration can be done through the web-based GUI. I've been running it on two machines for a few months and it seems to be working well.

acid_kewpie,
Have you used ipcop? I'm using SmoothWall Express now & I'm curious how they differ from each other.

Also, their site is a little cryptic, how do we know know it's SmoothWall Express they split off from?

Finally, do you know what the underlying distro is? (RH, Debian, etc.)