New Firewall?!?

As my trusty old Pentium 133 died not too long ago I am in the process of building a new firewall. The old firewall is temporarily replaced by a 700 MHz Celeron running with the same harddrive and setup that ran on the 133.

The 133 had a friend in a 233 Pentium MMX which did the fileserving, http-proxy etc job. Both of these are now retired and in the process of being replaced by a single machine. Until I get my hands on some new hardware the semi old Celeron (bought back in 1999 or 2000) which is actually my parent's machine will perform as a stand-in.

The old firewall/server pair ran Debian with 2.4_bf kernels. And as the Celeron just "inherited" the disk from the old firewall it still runs the 2.4 Debian kernel. When time allows I will be building a new boot drive to replace it. This drive will replace the Debian now running on the interim 700 MHz celeron. It will also be the boot drive of the new system.

The choice of distribution for the new firewall/server machine will be ubuntu server. I am not quite sure if it will be the 7.04 or the older 6.06 LTS(Long Term Support) version. I have decided to switch to Ubuntu as it ;

1. Builds upon the Debian distribution which is well-known for its stability
2. Includes newer versions and newer alternatives to the Debian Stable branch

My initial focus will be on the firewall as this machine will be the test bed of firewall implementations that I will do in the future. One of which will be the net cafe.

The hardware for the future firewall/server wil most likely be a socket 775 celeron on a MSI motherboard with Intel chip set. the plan is to make a smallish boot disk (80GB) and then use a RAID 1 system to hold the data in the /home tree.

More tomorrow on the setup that I am planning for this machine.