Wireless firewall options

Hi - here's what I want to do:

I've got a PII based PC, a USB ADSL modem and a PCI Wifi card. I would like
to set up the PC to do the NAT/firewall and stuff and that's about it.
Ideally I don't want to run the hard disk in the interests of power saving
and noise limitation, so I was wondering how easy it is to develop a Linux
distro that would boot and run from a CD and RAM - possibly using the floppy
for config files and stuff.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I've heard there are such products already
about but I doubt they'll have drivers for my kit?

Cheers.

--
| Tim Andrews (tim-andrews@nospam.dsl.pipex.com)
|
| "Spam sucks, eat ham."

Tim Andrews <tim-andrews@nospam.dsl.pipex.com> wrote:
> Hi - here's what I want to do:
>
> I've got a PII based PC, a USB ADSL modem and a PCI Wifi card. I would like
> to set up the PC to do the NAT/firewall and stuff and that's about it.
> Ideally I don't want to run the hard disk in the interests of power saving
> and noise limitation, so I was wondering how easy it is to develop a Linux
> distro that would boot and run from a CD and RAM - possibly using the floppy
> for config files and stuff.
>
> Any ideas would be appreciated. I've heard there are such products already
> about but I doubt they'll have drivers for my kit?

I would suggest you have a look at Pebble Linux, which is based on
Debian. It loads from HD, but runs from RAM, so you can turn off the HD
after it boots (hdparm -y /dev/hda). Being Debian based, you can install
any Debian package on it you like, and it will strip out the bits that
aren't needed to run it, such as documentation and locales.

It's common to run Pebble Linux from a Compact Flash drive, so it should
be really silent.

--
Cameron Kerr
cameron.kerr@paradise.net.nz : http://nzgeeks.org/cameron/
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