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update, as some of their "documentation" is out of date, or wrong.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. > > mark Mark 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. David