Routing

[Two_five_zero_one]

I spoke with my cousin earlier today and he mentioned another option to IPMASQ which is Freesco. Has anyone tried this? I know some BSD guys that swear by this method of routing, just wondering if you guys have had any experience with this. thanx

2501

[sfam]

freesco is not a "method of routing" per se. It's actually a specialized, micro-distribution.

I don't have any personal experience with freesco, but I've heard a lot of good about it. There are others out there designed for the same purpose as well, such as LRP (Linux Router Project), LOAF (Linux On A Floppy), and others.

For the last few years I've always used a "regular" distro such as SuSE or RedHat and stripped it down manually and secured it for use as a firewalling router. Just recently I started playing with LRP and it really does have some major advantages over my old method. First obvious one is LRP doesn't require the stripping down, it already is almost as minimal as possible.

Especially if you have an old 3- or 486 lying around not doing anything. Rip the HDD out of it if it has one, get your distro of choice, configure it, run a null-modem serial cable from it to your workstation, set the BIOS to halt on no errors, remove keyboard and monitor, and you have a headless, high performance router.