david wrote:
At 07:43 AM 6/29/2015, you wrote:
James B. Byrne wrote:
On Mon, June 29, 2015 02:14, Sorin Srbu wrote: OS 6?
Please note: I'm not criticizing, just curious about the argument behind using a regular OS to do firewall-stuff.
Maintenance.
A consistent set of expectations does wonders for debugging odd-ball occurrences. Why learn the idiosyncrasies of two distros when one suffices? Just start with a minimal CentOS install on your router/gateway and add only the packages that you know that you need. Any critical omission will evidence itself in short order and can be added then; or the source of the need removed as circumstance warrants.
Yup. For, um, about a dozen years, I ran RH 7.1,7.2, 7.3, and eventually 9 on an old box that was nothing but a firewall router. I was seriously paranoid - no gcc or any development tools, no X, not much of anything. To the best of my knowledge, we never had a breakin.
I'm running DD-WRT on an ASUS router these days, and I'm *NOT* wildly impressed. I mean, it seems ok, but the project is run in what I can only describe as "amateur", in the worst sense of the word. The several official developers release a build, and you can choose which one of who's; people on the mailing list have "favorite builds", which is not a phrase I have *ever* heard used with an o/s before, and I'm afraid to update, as some of their "documentation" is out of date, or wrong.
At some point, I may just get a PI, and run CentOS, or some firewall/router distro, though that would mean not having WiFi for guests.
markMark The WiFi solution I use still uses a Centos 6 firewall/router/gateway, but one of my inside devices is a WiFi router. Rather than doing double routing, I connect one of the WiFi's LAN connections via a switch to my Router via a switch, leaving the WiFi Router's WAN conection unused. That way, my gateway (and not the WiFi router) is the DHCP server, and can enforce whatever firewall rules I want to apply.
No need to give up your guest WiFi if you stick with a Centos gateway.
Hmmm... that's a thought. On the other hand, for defence in depth, I'm sort of leary about using my own system as a firewall. As I noted, on my old firewall/router box, I had almost nothing. That's why I'm considering a PI....
mark