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#1 2009-10-13 17:38:21
- Elssar
- Member
- From: New Delhi, India
- Registered: 2009-10-11
- Posts: 4
Building a Gateway Firewall
Hey guys I'm gonna try & build a gateway firewall on my old, busted up desktop for my semester project & I'm gonna use Arch Linux as the OS.
Any suggestions on what specs should I have?
The current specs of the desktop are - 256MB DDR RAM, AMD Athlon2400+ 2000MHz & a 80GB Segate Barracuda HDD. I think I need more RAM.
Also, which desktop environment should I use?
Any suggestions, both about the H/W & S/W would be appreciated.
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#2 2009-10-13 21:59:55
- fukawi2
- Ex-Administratorino
- From: .vic.au
- Registered: 2007-09-28
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Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
The current specs of the desktop are - 256MB DDR RAM, AMD Athlon2400+ 2000MHz & a 80GB Segate Barracuda HDD. I think I need more RAM.
For a pure firewall in a home environment, that should be plenty good enough. If you want to start doing things like running a web proxy too then increasing the RAM to 512 or 1gb would be a good idea.
Also, which desktop environment should I use?
On a server, no DE.
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#3 2009-10-13 22:23:13
- MadTux
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- Registered: 2009-09-20
- Posts: 553
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
If you really intend to use it only as firewall/gateway the specs are more than sufficient. Arch without DE consumes approximately 60MB (depending on what daemons you are running). So your 256MB are more than enough. If you want to do more on that computer, the most important part to upgrade would be RAM,
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#4 2009-10-14 02:19:56
- gog
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- Registered: 2009-10-13
- Posts: 103
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
Your DE should be a remote screen login from your main computer.
Bogging down your server with a proper DE will make you spend more money on something that you don't need, namely GUIs that have no business being installed on a server.
All you need is iptables for gateway and firewall, and screen/ssh. That's it.
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#5 2009-10-14 07:41:57
- brazzmonkey
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- From: between keyboard and chair
- Registered: 2006-03-16
- Posts: 818
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
With such specs, there should be no trouble.
I've got an legacy celeron 633, 256 MB SDRAM, which acts as a gateway with privoxy, polipo, cups server, file server and webradio player. There's no problem whatsoever, it's reasonably fast to boot (about 1 minute) and runs decently. It was not meant to have a GUI.
Now, this machine also runs a photo slideshow so I decided to use LXDE as desktop environment. It's not balzing fast, but it's usable. It hardly plays videos, but I can surf the web with midori. And my 256 MB RAM are not an issue here.
So I guess you should be just fine as long as you choose a light DE or no DE at all.
what goes up must come down
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#6 2009-10-14 10:23:11
- Elssar
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- From: New Delhi, India
- Registered: 2009-10-11
- Posts: 4
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
Well I'd prefer putting a DE in cuz this will be my semester project & it wouldn't hurt if I had some nice screen shots in the project report, also I'm not entirely comfortable working in a CLI.
Thanks for the advice guys, I think I'm gonna use fluxbox, just cuz I like the name 
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#7 2009-10-14 10:37:22
- fukawi2
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Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
If you're being graded on how pretty your screenshots are, or how cool the name of the DE is, then I'd be looking for another school 
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#8 2009-10-14 10:53:23
- Elssar
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- From: New Delhi, India
- Registered: 2009-10-11
- Posts: 4
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
If you're being graded on how pretty your screenshots are, or how cool the name of the DE is, then I'd be looking for another school
Yeah well the name is for me & here in India practical work counts for nothing in terms of grade, what matters is your viva & your presentation. I could make nothing at all & still get away with it. I'm making this for myself.
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#9 2009-10-14 10:59:00
- tomk
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- From: Ireland
- Registered: 2004-07-21
- Posts: 9,839
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
Apart from the unnecessary bloat that a DE or WM brings to a project like this, consider the fact that a gateway/firewall typically sits in a corner/attic/cellar/whatever doing its work - with nobody looking at it. In fact, many such machines operate headless anyway.
If your teachers/lecturers know what they're doing, they should penalise you for putting a GUI on your firewall. 
Actually, one exception occurs to me as I'm typing this, and that would be a web GUI, like IPCop, Smoothwall, etc. But you probably don't want to do that either.
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#10 2009-10-14 11:21:36
- Elssar
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- From: New Delhi, India
- Registered: 2009-10-11
- Posts: 4
Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
If your teachers/lecturers know what they're doing, they should penalise you for putting a GUI on your firewall.
Well they don't know what they are doing Plus here in practicals STYLE wins over substance. Our education system is more theory oriented, practicals are there just cuz they have to be there.
And I want to put the DE in cuz I'm gonna do it later anyways & make that system my lab rat to experiment on.
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#11 2009-10-21 21:32:37
- Sjoden
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- From: WA
- Registered: 2007-08-16
- Posts: 380
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Re: Building a Gateway Firewall
If you really want to, I'd suggest OpenBox or something similar. It is light enough. You could even have some terminal emulators open showing real time logging or something, put on a fancy wallpaper and that sounds like what you want.
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