Hi all

I currently using Slackware 8.1 in a growing number of firewall installations.

To aid me in this I have been thinking of building my own dedicated firewall distro (CD and/or network install - and later also upgrade).

I want to strip down the contents of the original Slackware distro, add the latest stable kernel, iptables, SuperFreeS/WAN, provide my own modified startup scripts and so on.

Can anyone point me to sites with info that would be usefull for this project. Or perhaps provide ideas and insights right out of your head here in this forum?

Regards,
Henning

I use Slack for this purpose as well. What I have done to ease the installation and configuration time is do an installation, configure, test, upgrade packages as required, etc.

Then do a tar backup to a file on the hard disk. Then I burn the tar backup and a kernel image onto a bootable CD. Then when I want to install, Boot the CD, partition, format, mount the CD and restore the tar image. Then I only have to configure for the actual install site and localize. This works well for me. My gateway servers only run at runlevel 3 and so I do not install X, KDE, or GNome. Most of the libraries are not needed either. The tar backup is usually around 200 MBytes and the installed file system is about 800 MBytes. But this helps to eliminate reinstalling, upgrading, configuring, testing, etc. over and over and over again. Since most of my installs are Linux software RAID I also include everything setup for that as well. But for the units that are not RAID it also provides a rather simple restore process in the event of a hard disk failure.