Capabilities of older hardware (was Re: [plug] Mandrake 9.1)

[Craig Ringer]

> PCMCIA Wireless Card and 10 NIC
> 512/128 PPPoE

You have DSL, right - how are you getting by w/o 2 NICs. Do you not have 
a wired LAN at all, just run with only 802.11b? (*shudders* at security 
implications of that unless you have ipsec going internally)

I'm going to have to replace my firewall soon because its only got 2 PCI 
slots, and I can't find a dual-port NIC for a decent price. I need 3 NICs:
	eth0: lan
	eth1: inet
	eth2: 802.11b

where the firewall routes between the 802.11b and wired ethernet 
networks, doing MAC address checking, possibly requiring IPsec, etc. I 
don't trust 802.11b one tiny bit, and I sure don't want to give 
unrestricted wireless access to my main LAN to anybody driving past.

> Actually old Laptops are very handy.

But very, very limited. Can't drop in a PCI card or two - which is why 
I'm not using my Gateway Solo 5150 ( PII/300, 64mb RAM ) as a firewall 
right now.

Then again, my firewall is an old DEC box a friend gave me. It had a 
P200 in it, and we clocked it down to 166Mhz then replaced the fan with 
a big heatsink from an IBM P100 (which run fanless). The PSU fan is near 
silent - the loudest part is the HDD and that's ridiculously quiet, its 
a 30gig Western Digital 5400rpm job.

> Cheap Wireless cards, sort of built-in UPS(battery). Got my modem hooked
> up to it and one day I'll get around to making it into answering machine
> as well.
> All running Vanilla Debian Woody.

... like 90% of the linux firewalls on the planet, I suspect.