Firewall/Proxy/Router Linux box

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Kasyx

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Right, considering tomorrow is Sunday, I will be attending Church; considering my religion is Linux, I generally consider doing something cool with it my sermon :D

I've got a box that has been sitting here for the past few months, just waiting to be turned into an artifact of pure awesome, and I think that time is nigh. The box is a 700mhz Celery with 256mb RAM and a 20GB (I think) hard drive. What I would like your input on, is what I should use to set this box up. What OS (it is probably gonna be Linux, I'm not in the mood to dust off my rusty BSD skills, I mean it is Sunday, after all), and distribution thereof? I was thinking of going with Slackware, or Ubuntu Server, though I don't quite trust Ubuntu server as of yet. The other option, of course, is Gentoo.

No, I will not touch SuSE, and I will curse you to the ninth circle of Hell for so much as mentioning it. Other possible options are CentOS, however I am a fan of the Debian package-management system (as well as yum and Emerge on Slackware and Gentoo, respectively); I do not like rpms, although I may be inclined to install from source. Any other thoughts on this one?

Also, what should I run on it? Do I go with IPcop, or IP Tables? I am thinking Squid, maybe with a SARG front-end for usage monitoring. Right now I don't see much point in running a mail server as I'm too lazy to set up name servers or dynamic DNS. Also what about routing software? I have several ADSL accounts and I have contemplated just using regular PPPoE connections invoked by custom bash scripts. That way I can keep an eye on International connectivity and if it is lost, accounts will be switched automatically, and I will be notified via email.

The way I see this fitting in to my network is basically by having all internal connections going into one of the eth interfaces on the box, only to be routed out another eth interface, using my Billion router as an ADSL modem.

What are your thoughts on this? Chances are none of you care enough to have read this far, and if you have, I salute you and request your input, as this is Serious Business :D

I'm off to bed, hopefully I will wake up in the morning to a mound of responses, discussing, in detail the merits and flaws of each Linux distribution in terms of this particular set up, as well as a heated debate about whether to use IPcop or IP Tables.

Chances of this occuring?

Minimal.

Well, g`night :D
 
I use the following in most of my small business clients:
www.clarkconnect.com (community edition)

I'ts a modified CentOS with all web interface control panels. They have been rock solid over the past 4 years. Having only to reload the dozen or so productions boxes once (due to dodgy hard drive).

One of the highlights is they have added the debian Aptitude package manager to distro. At installation you can decide what you want installed.

I have done basic firewall/gateway installations that took all of 15min. With a full small business sever (firewall, NAT, fileserver, Mailserver, webserver, mysql database, proxy, spam filter, Bandwidth shaping and VPN) talking about 120mins to setup for 20 users)
Maybe it does not give you the feeling of control you would prefer, but I have come to love the way, I can drop it in and forget about it.

I'm acually running my own Clarkconnect Gateway as a virtual server within VMware.
 
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If you REALLY want a challenge why don't you try do all that with MS products? :D:D:D Just kidding! I have only "played" a bit with Gentoo, Centos and Ubuntu and I think my weapon of choice against the big bad Internet would probably be Gentoo. But if you don't trust Ubuntu why don't you use that, give it a chance to earn your trust? :p
 
Do you want a firewall, or a private server that can do everything?
You have so much knowledge on all the different distro's, why do you still ask? Of coarse you are going to get someone who will tell you to use Ubuntu (cause what they know and trust), or Suse, or even Mandriva.

There's no right, or wrong answer to this questions. Whether you like apt, yum, ports or emerge is up to you. They all accomplish the same end results (yes, they do work differently and look different etc al), but surely you should already know what you want.

If you're lazy / don't have time / don't want to spend time on it / etc, take a look at SME 7.3 / Redwall / Monowall / Smoothwall etc.
 
SoftDux said:
Of coarse you are going to get someone who will tell you to use Ubuntu (cause what they know and trust)
Click to expand...

Or because mindless repetition is best used against logic, the opponent forfeits every time (albeit out of frustration)

C'mon Kasyx, if this is "serious business", then use BSD... you know want to ;):p

Not hard at all, dusty skills or not. The only problem you might have is shaking off that retarded Sys V
 
SoftDux said:
Do you want a firewall, or a private server that can do everything?
You have so much knowledge on all the different distro's, why do you still ask? Of coarse you are going to get someone who will tell you to use Ubuntu (cause what they know and trust), or Suse, or even Mandriva.

There's no right, or wrong answer to this questions. Whether you like apt, yum, ports or emerge is up to you. They all accomplish the same end results (yes, they do work differently and look different etc al), but surely you should already know what you want.

If you're lazy / don't have time / don't want to spend time on it / etc, take a look at SME 7.3 / Redwall / Monowall / Smoothwall etc.
Click to expand...

I may have knowledge on them, but that does not mean that other people's input would not assist me in my decision. I am not looking for right or wrong answers, I am looking for opinions. Also, I have nothing against Ubuntu, I usually scream its name from the rooftops when it comes to desktop distributions.

Maybe I should try it out and give it a chance. Then again we generally use Slackware and CentOS at work, so it wouldn't hurt to use one of those, you know, for practice :D

I'm not too keen on going with a "pre-built" firewall, and would prefer to build from scratch. BSD is probably the best option and would give me the most "street cred", but I just enjoy Linux too much :)

Thanks for the help guys, so far I am leaning towards Slackware, or maybe even Gentoo (though not sure if I have the time).
 
I love the way my MS comment is just IGNORED! :D Probably find some of you guys are half turning to each other and whispering, "Did he really say that? Does he actually know ANYTHING? Poor chap."

I would be interested on what you decided on using and why. I also like to tinker with such stuffs. :cool:
 
MadMailMan said:
I love the way my MS comment is just IGNORED! :D Probably find some of you guys are half turning to each other and whispering, "Did he really say that? Does he actually know ANYTHING? Poor chap."
Click to expand...

jeez louise, Of course it was ignored. You did say "Just kidding!", so what did you expect? :confused:
 
Smoothwall? :)

What do you want to do with the box? Filter incoming/outgoing attempts? Or use it for traffic filtering as well as an email/web/ftp/file server?

It all depends on what you want to use it for, but I'll prefer to use a stripped-down Linux distro (such as Smoothwall) for the firewall and keep the server off on either the DMZ or the Green segment.
 
BTW, IPCop is its own distribution, you don't run it on top of another distro. ;)

For firewall, I use IPCop. For server I use Ubuntu server.

/me kicks RB in the nads
 
MadMailMan said:
If you REALLY want a challenge why don't you try do all that with MS products? :D:D:D Just kidding! I have only "played" a bit with Gentoo, Centos and Ubuntu and I think my weapon of choice against the big bad Internet would probably be Gentoo. But if you don't trust Ubuntu why don't you use that, give it a chance to earn your trust? :p
Click to expand...

I don't think the challenge would be in the install itself, but rather in living with myself afterwards :D
 
ld13 said:
jeez louise, Of course it was ignored. You did say "Just kidding!", so what did you expect? :confused:
Click to expand...

There's always a bit of truth in every joke. But using MS for this is a joke!

thisgeek said:
BTW, IPCop is its own distribution, you don't run it on top of another distro. ;)

For firewall, I use IPCop. For server I use Ubuntu server.

/me kicks RB in the nads
Click to expand...

I just thought of something different, if you want to, and had more CPU, RAM & HDD. Setup a Xen server, with a few Xen virtual hosts, each doing sometimes different. One could be the firewall, another a DMZ mail & web server, and another a file & proxy server - this makes the security even a bit more harder
 
thisgeek said:
BTW, IPCop is its own distribution, you don't run it on top of another distro. ;)

For firewall, I use IPCop. For server I use Ubuntu server.

/me kicks RB in the nads
Click to expand...

I'm aware of that :)

I just mentioned it at the same time as IP Tables and squid because it feels more like an app than a distribution :D
 
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