No subject

huge difference. It's the difference between an appliance and a computer.
One of them is simple, works, and is robust. The other is pretty close to
all of these except on certain occasions that you'll rarely get told about.

I suppose if I got all energetic I'd put together my pieces of 486 and
develop some patches to IPCop and Smoothwall so that they could use some
kind of journaling file system...

my grumbling little 2c worth...

Richard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Satrapa [mailto:grail at goldweb.com.au]
> Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2002 12:17 PM
> To: Richard Cottrill
> Cc: CLUG Mailing List
> Subject: Re: Best firewall gateway version of Linux ?
>
>
> On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 08:24 , Richard Cottrill wrote:
>
> > NBH - 'Not Built Here'
>
> > On Wednesday, January 16, 2002, at 11:17 , Richard Cottrill wrote:
> >>
> >>> I'm pretty sure that all of the problems with Smoothwall that you've
> >>> mentioned no longer exist. I suspect the NBH syndrome.
>
> I was content with the services that Smoothwall GPL did provide (ie:
> nothing), but the one thing I really wanted was the ability to SSH in
> from outside.  I already had the tunnelling solution (PPP over SSH -
> yeckk).
>
> I kept monitoring the SmoothWall GPL web site, but there was no action -
> just lots of boasting of how many billions of copies had been
> downloaded.  So I spent a day pulling apart the web pages, and ported
> them across to a Debian box - there's a bit more involved than just
> calling pon/poff :)
>
> 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".
>
> The friends I've installed the old smoothwall box for have a habit of
> unplugging it to plug in guitar amps, vacuum cleaners, disco lights...
> whatever.
>
> "Not Invented Here" was the least of my worries.  I *wanted* to use a
> prepackaged firewall product, but none of the ones I found at the time
> were any good for what I wanted to do.
>
> Anyhow, at the time of writing, I can't go off to research the latest
> version of SmoothWall GPL or IPcop, because Telstra's ADSL network is in
> its usual state.
>
> Regards
> Alex
>