Best firewall gateway version of Linux ?

[Bob Edwards]

Alex Satrapa wrote:

> Now the big feature that I'm looking for is resilience against being
> switched off without being shut down.  I think I can do this with my
> existing setup by switching to EXT3 or ReiserFS or whatever.  And
> possibly seeing how much I can split the file system into "read only"
> and "don't care" partitions.  Then figuring out how to convince fsck
> that when I say "answer yes to all questions", I *mean* "answer yes to
> all questions" - not just "answer yes to all questions except the ones
> where there's a choice between yes or no".
> 

We have been using gibraltar here at Dept. of Computer Science for a
little while. It is a debian-based CD only system (doesn't need a hard
drive at all) and uses a floppy a boot time to load in /etc stuff.

I think this is the right way to go for a firewall (no hard disk).
We have the logs written to a separate loghost machine.

We have "added" to gibraltar by copying the CD to a hard disk. We then
chrooted and used apt-get to add new packages (we wanted NTP added). Then
mkisofs the whole thing and reburn onto a CD. Works OK for us.

What it needs is a better interface for configuration (like Smoothwalls).

Get it at "http://www.vianova.at/index.php?product_gibraltar_overview_eng"
(for the English version - it comes from Italy).

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.