I have been lucky enough to get a halfway decent pc given to me, making my old and very slow pc somewhat redundant. However, I seem to remember reading somewhere that there is a distro of linux that can turn such a pc into a firewall/router if I cram it with network cards, this could prove to be an ideal solution to my networking needs.

has anyone had experience of such a distro? I looked on distrowatch, but I couldn't swear as to which distro would suit my needs best. it'll have to be lightweight, but I won't be asking a lot from the processor or graphics, so I'm guessing it's been done already.

advice would be greatly appreciated.

thanks in advance

dave

Smoothwall
vyatta

lots of choices out there..

the Distrowatch search for firewall distros contains a pretty big list, with descriptions on each..

IPcop is another choice, and if you have a supported model some can be installed on the router itself as an alternative firmware, dd-wrt open-wrt and x-wrt.

IPCop is one of the easiest to use, in my opinion. I ran that for a few years at several sites.
Even though I now run BSD-based pfSense, I really would recommend IPCop as there's a quite helpful community in its support forums.

http://ipcop.sourceforge.net

Install some cheap Intel 8255x-based PRO/100 NIC's easily found on eBay for cheap and you'll be good to go!