Jul 21 2004

Connectivity Issues

Published by Martin at 7:48 am under Site Configuration

The last couple of days I have been having some connectivity issues which are sort of confusing and really starting to annoy me. I think a large part of my problems are my firewall, a Coyote Linux Floppy-based firewall, running on a 486 with 16 megs of memory. This has worked pretty well for me for about 2 years, and overall I really like Coyote Linux, but every once and a while the firewall stops passing traffic. At least I think it’s the firewall. What happens is I loose connection to my ISP until I log on to the firewall and ping my ISP. The problem may be the DSL modem, it may be the firewall, or there may be some other problem that I haven’t figured out yet. I highly suspect that the issue is the memory on the firewall, but since I don’t have any more memory of that vintage, I think I’ll just create a new firewall and hope that’s the issue.

I’m looking at Smoothwall, and from what everyone has told me it’s pretty good. I have a spare PII 266 with 128 megs sitting in the garage, which should be more than enough to power a decent home firewall. My other option is to put in my Cisco 806 router with a firewall ruleset, but I’m a little leery of this as a solution. The 806 has limited memory, and despite what was advertised when I first purchased the router, it can’t take an IOS with full firewall and security functionallity. I could upgrade the memory, but the last time I checked, the memory for this system would actually cost me more than a new Linksys would. A new Linksys router is another option, but right now the budget is a little stretched and any new hardware might get me killed. Ah, for the days when I was single and kidless. Wait, strike that. When I was single and kidless I was also unemployed for long stretches, so the budget wasn’t any better. Oh whell.

Anyone else have any experience with Coyote Linux? Anyone else experienced the type of problems I’m seeing?

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2 Responses to “Connectivity Issues”

  1. # HCon 22 Jul 2004 at 3:49 am

    I’ve been using floppyfw for a while now on my ComCast cable connection. The thing about ComCast is that they register the MAC address that you use when you first connect when your account is set up. I did this with a Win2K laptop and a Xircom ethernet PCMCIA card. Well, my f/w was a 486DX2-50 w/ 20MB RAM (at the time). Fortunately, the config file for floppyfw includes a line for specifying a MAC address for the external interface to use.

    Also, not too long ago, the power supply in my 486 went wonky, so I got rid of that box and put a P-II system I have in it’s place. All that’s required is a box w/ 2 NICs and some RAM…no hard drives needed. Free, and very nice.

  2. # Martinon 22 Jul 2004 at 7:05 am

    I went out and found the link for floppyfw, http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/index.html (I don’t allow html in the comments). I’ll take a look at it and let you know what I think. My family is taking a vacation without me, so I’ll have some time to work on this in the near future. Now if I can only find two working NICs in my closet.