[wellylug] Laptop as a firewall?

Ian Beardslee itb at falcons.co.nz
Sun Jun 27 14:39:43 NZST 2004


Afternoon all, and good morning to those that are reading this tomorrow 
morning. :-)

I have decided to splash out and finally get cable internet (ok, playing 
catch up to the bro-in-law), but before I do that I am wanting to ensure 
that I have a survivable firewall running for the home network.

The plan is that I have a laptop (P200MMX, 144MB, 2GB, CD, Floppy, 1 x 
USB, PCMCIA, dodgey screen) as the firewall.  Using the laptop means that 
it is small, lowish power, relatively quiet and I don't need to have a 
screen and keyboard cluttering things up.  With the laptop down by the TV 
in the living room, the wireless PCMCIA card (still to be bought) connects 
to the wireless access point (still to be bought) in the 'computer room' 
where the rest of the PCs connect to it via a hub (got one of those :-) 
and any wireless laptops the flatmate may happen to have.

I was getting all gungho to install ipcop or smoothwall to the laptop but 
neither of those support PCMCIA or USB Wireless (or even wired) yet - of 
course I discover this after downloading the ISO and the fixes for ipcop :
-(

** NOTE TO SELF: - RTFM FIRST **

The first thing that went through my head (well after some colourful 
language) was grab the ipcop source and recompile an updated kernel for it 
- anyone tried that?  Had any luck?

Of course I could just go the Linksys WRT54G way and think about using a 
third party image for the extra bits I think I want :-)

Does anyone have any other bright ideas?

Many thanks in anticipation,

Ian





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