Freesco is cheap and works easily

Finding out the perfect firewall = utopia. I picked Freesco: a nice small floppy-based Linux distro, based on a 2.0.x (actually I am using 2.0.39) Kernel. In the creator own words: "single floppy router".

The history of Freesco is nicely described on Dingetje's DocuWiki (dingetje.homeip.net/dokuwiki/freesco/history): I first started with v0.2.7, the first dream version of this nice router; it was stable, outstanding, and as long as the configuration was done by the book (i.e., by using a colored ncurses-based terminal on it's startup, or by entering the setup script), everything works smoothly.

The real dogma on Freesco is that: to fit in a 1.4 Mb small floppy, by default. Obviously a reasonable choice is to install it on a hard-drive, by calling a simple script named 'move2hdd'.

The requirements I did set for my box (the Freesco box) were:

1. provide a permanent Internet firewalled connection for my 4 PCs intranet
2. a web portal
3. a well-served MTA
4. an sshd server
   

The first is real easy to configure, following the installation steps. (It's a are occasion in Linux flavoured distros to have it running by using so few steps of concise indications.)

The second is by default thttpd (personally I do not like this lightweight web server, it's ugly to configure); so when Dingetje has announced his package of the Apache/1.3.27 server I did install it right away (it is still a great package, it worked out of the box -- I just had to change to a decent Kernel with IPC support).

Then the third, took me extra time to have it decently: the ugly Exim3 was by that time the only MTA available; I had to wait for a released package of Exim4 more than a month, so I decided to compile it myself with relevant supported features (Exim4 4.34). For those who haven't compiled packages for Freesco already: it's an annoying process that requires a Zipslack distro, for instance, and then an ugly scheme of scripting -- that should include some level of compatibility checking against previously installed packages.
Philip Hazel (biography) developed this great MTA (I call it the Mail Transfer Agent): he kindly provided me support for some necessary adaptations I had to make on his latest 4.6x releases.
I have Exim 4.60 currently, it works in an excellent way.

The fourth requisite is really easy to have; I prefer to have it firewalled from the outside -- the security (more or less regular) updates are provided by Dingetje -- always working out of the box.

The hardware requisites are really low. Installing Freesco for dummies is here:

• http://bakskuru.se/fredrik/freesco/setup.html

For a simple router, consider two network cards. I have PCMCIA (I use a laptop Pentium 133 MHz, wow, it's really a small & slow box) so I had to install some extra ugly drivers.
I bought this box for about 150 euros (second owner) with 2 PCMCIA adapters, then a 3Com ADSL modem with support for ethernet (do not ever think to have this box running USB!) for 50 euros: the cost of this equipment is around 200 euros in total. Pretty cheap.