RFC - Fedora on old hardware

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

mark wrote:

> Ok, I'm having trouble with my home network firewall box, and it may 
> need a reinstall (hard drive problems).
>
> This is a 166MHz Pentium-S. Don't even *think* of telling me to go out 
> and buy new hardware.... It's got under 100M RAM, and I'm not sure I 
> have space to put more DIMMs in.
>
> It's a firewall/router, and *nothing* else. I don't install X on such 
> a box.
>
> So, I'd like some comments: should I go to Fedora 2 or 3? Is it the 
> case that with 2, it started using kernel 2.6? If so, do I have to 
> worry about speed, or memory size?
>
>     mark

I used to use LRP (linux router project), a router and firewall on a 
floppy, on a 486 with 16 megs of ram and four NIC's.  The project is now 
defunct, though googling for "linux router floppy" brings up a bunch of 
hits.  The beauty of these distros is that once they boot, they're solid 
state (meaning that they run entirely in RAM).  Eventually I got fancy, 
found an old 100MB hd and loaded the boot image onto it to speed up the 
boot process.

If you have a bootable CDROM on that thing, you could burn the image 
onto a CD...

Just some thoughts.

Ben