Time for a commitment

[pierrehugo]

Ok guys not that the current system on myadsl hasnt helped me in the past but can someone who has linux please "diside" they are gonna help me, I have never ever used linux before and will be a complete noob,

I would like to get an old PC with two network cards running as a sort of gateway/router thing using any software really but linux seems to be the best, does anyone feel like helping a noob...

Also I am only a kid so It would be awsome to learn some networking etc. skillz from this...

I have an old laptop atm that is not being used I can get a PCMA LAN card for that, or is that a bad idea...

I would like to set up a ?caching? ?transparent? ?proxy/router? that can use a routed (IE not dial-up style) connection for international and a routed RASPPPOE connection for local and proactivly select between them, also a chache for HHTP would be awsome because facebook is chowing BW atm.

possible, silly?

Any thoughts welkom, thanx for reading

-Pierre

 

[SecretCode]

I'm not "disiding" to help you ... yet however ...

SmoothWall can do all of those things, except split local and international traffic, and it can probably do that with a mod, I just never got around to it. SmoothWall is based on a very stripped-down linux (ideal for security) and will run on any old PC (but try to get 256MB of RAM or more, or some logging/filtering functions will give problems). Laptops not such a good idea.

You should dedicate the PC to the firewall job, not run any other services on it, and not try for dual boot.

Where are you located btw?

 

[pierrehugo]

Cape Town thnx for that, so is smoothwall just a distro, or does it come with software for this...??

 

[zamrg]

or u can take a look at ipcop, which is the 'modified' and continued work based off smoothwall. You'll find many threads on here about ipcop, but the one you're probably looking for is 'Splitting International and Local Bandwidth with IPcop' @ http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?t=64649&highlight=ipcop

You log in to the ipcop web interface and everything is pretty much plug and play. The GUI is easy to use and the advanced configuration is all already done for you. It comes with squid which you can set up as a transparent proxy, dns caching, etc.

oh, and you might wanna read up about it first @ http://www.ipcop.org

 

[SecretCode]

Yes, smoothwall and ipcop are self-contained linux distributions with squid and other firewall services, and without unnecessary components (ie they are not full distributions). You only need the hardware.

 

[Asha'man X]

A word on caching if I may.

I am starting to wonder just how effective a cache can be. I recently went back to my old high school, and did work there for them. I looked at the IPCop box I had set up, and the thing had transferred about 1.3gigs over the 24 hour period. About 50megs of that was cached, the rest was "cache misses"

I suppose that for a place where the range of websites visited are fairly static, you can get higher cache hits, and therefore save bandwidth. My work now has a squid proxy running, and it has a decent cache hit rate. However, with the dymanic nature of many websites, I am not sure how much the cache can actually help anymore. Few sites are just plain static html.

Concerning what you want to do, Smoothwall and IPCop come well recommended. There's also pfSense (based on FreeBSD), which is a very powerful router/firewall mini distro.

 

[Juggy]

Most websites these days have the no_cache option enabled in the pages or content expiry set to a low integer. I wouldn't even worry about setting up a cache for less than 10 users to be honest. Probably not even worth while for less than 50.