[wellylug] 386 firewall/router help

Robin Hinde rjhinde at mail.computers.org.nz
Tue Apr 22 21:29:06 NZST 2003


Colin, 

Stick with Freesco.

I've used Freesco 0.26 for years (even rebooted it a couple of times :-) and 
it works well with ISA cards. I'm running it on a 486 DEC slimline with 16MB 
and floppy only. You may be a little light with 5MB - well worth adding more 
memory if possible. With 8MB you can run the web server for control but it 
works better with 16MB. I wouldn't bother running a hdd, just adds to power 
draw and noise.

Don't worry about the NIC, if the system boots, you can login at the console 
as root (default password is root) and run setup. Look under:

 2) change advanced settings --> a) Advanced settings -->
[ Ethernet cards ] --> 81. 1st card 

And follow the prompts to enter your ISA NIC I/O port address and IRQ 
manually. Sometimes setting or finding these settings is the hardest part, 
maybe easiest under Windows if you have that on the hdd.

If you are using a NIC not supported by the basic Freesco bootdisk you 'll 
need to find the required module from one of the Freesco archives and copy 
that into /mnt/router/drv:

----- lsmod -----
Module          Pages           Used by
/mnt/router/drv/eexpress.o.C 3          0

It all works like a charm, I've set several of these things up for friends and 
it always works really well.

The Freesco forums are also excellent for finding tips.

You can control the gateway manually if you need to, either by telnet (control 
status|up|down|force|block) or by browser. I usually leave an xterm open 
running lynx at 192.168.0.1:82 in case I need to make the phoneline available 
quickly.

I've downloaded 0.27 but haven't tried it, 0.26 is a bit old but it works so 
well I really don't want to change it.

cheers

  -=rjh=-




On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 14:29, Klenner, Colin wrote:
> I have acquired a 386sx Acer - nice little box. Very quiet.
> It has 5MB RAM and 120Mb HDD, 1.44 FDD.
> It has 2 x ISA slots so I can put a modem in one and a NE2000 compat NIC in
> the other.
>
> Which I did.
>
> It has Win 3.11 on the HDD so I verified everything else worked, the modem
> I have from another working PC.
>
> I tried Freesco 0.26, 0.27 and 0.30 versions. First and last lock up during
> boot when they get to the 'loading packages' messge.
> 0.27 boots well, not problem, detects modem, even can boot of the HDD
> easily.
>
> Problem is that it looks for an Ne-compat card on a PCI slot!
> I can't figure out how to change the NIC driver or reconfigure it to look
> at ISA instead.
>
> Any ideas or anything else suitable I can use? That I do not have to spend
> hours downloading?
>
> ~~~
> Colin
> Reply to: colink at clear.net.nz




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