DHCP,Firewall,Content Filtering Help

[binarykungfu]

I have an extra computer with 2 nic cards and would like to set it up as a dhcp server, firewall, content filtering. and proxy caching. Which version of fedora should I run C3 or C4? Also this machine has the intel 810 chipset which is known for video issues?

System Specs:
Pentium 3 1Ghz
Intel 810 Chipset
512M Ram
20Gb HD
3com Nic
Linksys Nic

[kg4cbk]

Other than initial setup you don't really need a video interface. Do a text install then set it up as a headless system. If you want/need a GUI type front end setup VNC and run that from your other systems. You can also use X11 forwarding to get GUI type displays back to your other systems.

As to which version you want to run, it depends (standard consultant answer :) )

Either will do those functions. For a firewall probably the most important thing is to keep up with security updates. You don't have to update everything on the system, but when a security update comes out for packages you have loaded it needs to be applied. Updates for cosmetic things are less important.

Since this will be a firewall you will want to install a minimal set of packages and harden the box as much as possible. Plan on spending some time running scans against it to verify that things are working as you expected.

Hope that helps and good luck!

[binarykungfu]

Thanks kg4cbk. What about setting up partitions will the default layout be ok?

[kg4cbk]

Partition layout depends on the size of the harddrive you have availiable.

For a firewall it would not be a bad idea to have a separate /tmp with nosuid and noexec options set.

You may also want a separate /var file system since your log files will be under there. If you have another server that is always up you may also want to configure syslogd to send a copy of you log files to that system. Helpful if you have to analyze potential break ins.

If you have a small harddrive however you may want to use the default setup. /, /boot, and swap.

Setup tripwire on the firewall an tweak the policy file to watch almost everything. Setup chkrootkit and rkhunter in a cron job. I use a filter in my email client to check the tripwire reports and flag those that have violations or errors. It automates part of that process.

[binarykungfu]

is there like a tutorial to get everything setup?

[kg4cbk]

There are any number of them on the web. Check out fedorafaq.org and the fedora documentation project to start with. There are number of how to's on this forum as well.