I have been using an old 486 laptop running Windows 95 and Wingate
(http://www.wingate.net/) for about 5 years now to share my cable modem on a
home LAN. The only admin problems I have had are a weekly reboot of the
Windows machine to reclaim lost memory and occasionally opening a port for
some special software (i.e. I use AtomTime to set all the clocks on my
network).

I am sure a Linux based proxy/firewall would not loose memory as Windows
does so someday I may switch to a Linux solution.

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of
alandd@mindspring.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 8:54 AM
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Re: Windows Internet Connection Sharing


I put Smoothwall firewall on a 100mhz 486 with a 170MB hard drive that cost
me $10.  Took about .5 hour, mostly because one of the network cards was
bad.  Admin is from a web page.  Has no monitor or keyboard attached and
sits on the top shelf of my computer hutch.  I only have to touch it when
the DSL goes down or the power goes out.  It just sits there at works.

Now when friends come over and want to hook up or I want the kids to surf on
something other than my computer, I just attach to the hub and go.  No admin
time at all.

Alan

plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us wrote:
> alandd@mindspring.com wrote:
> My suggestion is to avoid the entire issue and
> setup a 486 without a hard drive running a
> floppy distro as a firewall/NAT box.

Thanks, Alan.

Two boxes will have to be my limit.

The problem is that I don't have the time or
the space to set up and maintain YET another
box, another keyboard, another monitor ...
I'm a programmer, not a sysadmin.

And I have zero budget for added toys:
a three-way KVM switch, with cables, would
cost me $150 or so as far as I can determine.

My Debian box is a Pentium 166, so
it would not be a bad candidate as
my front end, but then I'd risk losing
my network connection any time I was
tinkering with the Debian box.
The Windows box is static (I doubt I'll
ever move beyond Win98), so it should
be a good portal if that will work.

You can spend your life on this kind
of thing and never get around to
developing software ...

Vic
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