Re: [seul-edu] Advice on Linux servers

[Rasjid Wilcox <rasjidw@bigpond.com>]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2001 16:33, Andrew Reid wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2001 at 08:36:10PM -0600, Dave Prentice wrote:
> > I don't know if you're talking about a "big" router like Cisco, but my
> > classroom has a 486-100 with a floppy and 16meg of RAM as the router. It
> > runs freesco. There are 20 clients, and it's a 10mbit connection. So far
> > it seems perfectly capable of meeting the demands of all the clients at
> > once. It's so reliable that it's easy to forget it's there.
>
> Don't forget that most Cisco's aren't exactly beast's either -- A 2500
> series only has a 20MHz processor.
>
> The same applies to the Lucent Wireless AP units. Open them up, and
> they've got AMD 486 processors inside. They're good for 10Mbit so long
> as you don't do anything fancy (like NAT).
>
> Of course, that doeesn't apply to all Cisco equipment. You can get
> multiprocessor giants that cost the same amount as a small house.
>
>    - andrew

Hopefully I'm not misunderstanding the question.  I would have thought that 
Smoothwall (http://www.smoothwall.org) would have been a good solution.  It 
does NAT, firewalling and intrusion detection and squid caching, and 
essentially runs like a network appliance, using a very simple and well 
designed web-based interface.  It will run happily on a 486 or better.  It 
requires almost no technical knowledge to install or set up.

Rasjid.