[H-GEN] CRUX (A programmers linux distro)

[Scott Burns]

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David Jericho wrote:
| [ Humbug *General* list - semi-serious discussions about Humbug and     ]
| [ Unix-related topics. Posts from non-subscribed addresses will vanish. ]
|
| Greg Black wrote:
|
|> I could not find anything at umart that had the one essential
|> feature not in the list you showed -- the ability to fall back
|> to a POTS dial-up when the ADSL falls over (mandatory at least
|> until the ADSL network becomes more robust).
|
|
| I dare suggest most users do not care about that functionality. Having
| said that. the CyberGuard SG[1] line of routers is capable of doing what
| you request, and are actually Linux based machines running from flash.
| You can access the configuration files directly via Web, SSH, Telnet, or
| serial depending on configuration.
|
|
|

	Count me in as one of the users who do need it.

	Both my home and work soloution are floppyfw from zelow.no  - at home I
run a 486 and at work a P100.  Neither have hard drives or CDROMs, and
the 486 runs without a CPU fan.  The software is solid as a rock - best
personally recorded uptime was 256 days, 5 hours - started with a power
failure and ended with me moving house.  Of course, all that actually
runs is the Linux kernel and a basic shell.

	Remote abuse is pretty hard - no ssh, telnet, rsh, or even serial
consoles (although the software does support all of these with add-oin
packages, or serial consoles standard).  The only way to get a shell is
to explot a kernel bug allowing you to download and install the
software, or to plonk yourself down at the console.

	I'd be curious to see what actually took more power and by how much, an
adsl modem with it's transformer or my 486 with it's AT power supply.
My money would be on the modem, but not by more than a factor of two.
All academic though, because the one at work is plugged into an ADSL
modem with a serial modem on standby, and my home one is plugged into a
serial modem now, and will be adding an ADSL modem once my application
goes through (9 weeks and counting...).

	Oh, and the 486 was $15 four years ago and came with a floppy and 4mb
RAM.  I had 8mb spare to get it up to scratch.

	That being said, I'd readily agree that most distros are not really
suited to being a firewall.  I don't know any offhand, except a modified
floppyfw, that fit into less than 100mb of hard drive space.  There is
way too much complexity there for my liking.

	Given you have put forward your opinion that PCs do not make good
firewall/routers, what would you recommend to someone on dialup?

Scott
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