Floppy Based Linux Distributions For Routers?

grimmy asks: "I've been looking around freshmeat at the floppy-Based Linux distro's, and would like some input on what fellow /. Readers think is the best one for older systems. I'm in need of a way to get a small NAT/firewall box running for my home lan with the dilemma of having very little HD space. Any recommendations would be great." [If it doesn't have to be Linux, you might find PicoBSD attractive. Does all you want, and is a doddle to reconfigure for other tasks too - nik]

Using LRP in a commercial environment

[EricTheRed]

At work, I have 2 LRP boxes.

One is the default gateway for some 400 Win9x PC's, and is the definitive routing source for our WAN. All of our Cisco & Netgear-ISDN routers that connect our remote sites link to it at some point. It's a Pentium 150MHz with 32Mb of ram and a single 3Com ISA card, and it's hardly loaded at all.

The other one is a Pentium 100Mhz with 16Mb ram and 2 3Com ISA cards. It's acting as a firewall protecting a hefty laser printer from our PC's (JetAdmin under Win95 finds the printer and kills it).

On that one, I have a few ipfwadm rules that limit access to the unix server running our Council Tax & Housing Benefit's systems.

Re:Freesco

[homer_ca]

Freesco can do port forwarding. In the setup it's called "exporting a service". It doesn't include the isapnp tools. However the BIOS on most Pentium and newer boards will set up PNP ISA cards. 386/486 users should find a non-PNP ethernet card.

Re:Freesco

[ptomblin]

I find the Freesco documentation a little ... eccentric? Obviously not somebody whose first language is English. (Not a flame, just an observation) The documentation leaves unanswered two important questions:

Is it possible to do port forwarding in freesco? I have a router box, but port 80 (for instance) is forwarded to another server that sits behind it, currently using ipportfw.

Does it work with ISA Plug-n-Pray ethernet cards?

--
A "freaking free-loading Canadian" stealing jobs from good honest hard working Americans since 1997.

Re:Freesco

[killbill]

I second this motion. I looked at the LRP distributions, and choose freesco.

Materhorn (the last I looked at) is rich and powerfull, but very painfull to find all the parts and get set up. The documentation was spotty at best. Coyote has an easy setup, but only works as an ethernet to ethernet router, and won't support dial up.

Freesco is flexible, nicely integrated, well documented, and darned easy to set up. It works from a floppy or from the hard drive, and supports many different configurations (dial-up, ethernet, etc) right out of the box.

You should be able to set up a freesco router from scratch in less then an hour... It took me that long just to try and figure out what the latest version of the LRP and where to get the parts, much less get it installed.

It also got a basically perfect score from both saint and secure-me.org when I ran security audits against it.

Bill

http://sharethenet.com/

[Dr. Galazkiewicz]

A small web-centric and on a floppy IP-masq for modems or 2-nic lans. Doesn't seem to be much trouble, I use this at my parents house (one phone line...coax running down the hallway...non-tech users).

Lacks shell support (both local and remote) but it isn't an issue after I wrote my own web interface. The built-in one is way to complex/hard to use for novices.

Using it for about a year. Faster than teaching them ppp-on or dial-up-networking and I have only one 56k modem among 6 boxes.

http://sharethenet.com/faq.html

Would like something more powerfull backend-wise like caching, rc5 client, X, fortune, pine, and perl. But this is faster to setup and doesn't require me to tweak/fix anything.

Freesco

[homer_ca]

Try freesco [freesco.org]. It's simpler and easier to set up than LRP, although it doesn't have the more advanced features.

For more here's a few good sites that list distros. That's how I usually find new ones.

linuxlinks.com [linuxlinks.com]

Linux Weekly News [lwn.net]

linux.com [linux.com]

Linux Router Project

[Vito]

Well, there's always the ever-trusty Linux Router Project [linuxrouter.org] single-floppy distribution. That's exactly what it's designed for: a single-floppy that can do NAT/IP masq/routing etc. Unfortunately, Dave Cinege, the maintainer of the official distribution recently suffered a major systems failure, so the website might not be up. Might want to try the catch-all info site, lrp.c0wz.com [c0wz.com] for mirrors and better information, as the main site is outdated, anyway.

Also, there's a spinoff distribution using 2.2.x, and named after mountains. Previously there was Materhorn, and now it's Eiger, I think. It's maintained by Matthew Grant and is located at lrp.plain.co.nz [plain.co.nz].

There's also a commercial LRP spinoff called Coyote Linux [coyotelinux.com]. Looks pretty easy to use, but it costs money if you want a Windows-based disk creator (the free one is Linux based).

Trevor Marshall at Byte did a series of articles on using LRP as a home router. You can find them starting here [byte.com] to see how to have just a modem and your 10bT NICs set up. They continue here [byte.com] to add in DHCPd and 100bT cards, which teaches you all about LRP modules. Not sure there are any more in the series, but you can look around Byte's site.

--Vito