Building a standalone firewall

[Winnipesaukee]

I have a spare OLD Gateway sitting around, and I was thinking I could make a dedicated firewall out of it. I have a few questions though:

- does it have enough horsepower to be a firewall? (666Mhz celeron, 128MB RAM, It runs Win98 alright)

-What extra parts do I need? My network is a mix of wired and wireless

-What should I install on it? I definately want it to be Linux or Unix, I was thinking Smooth Wall or Devil-Linux, or maybe BSD

-Because it is slower than a boat out of water, will it affect the connection speed of my other computers?

-Has anyone else done this??

**I have cable, and DHCP (not static IP), and a mix of Linux systems and Windows systems, if it matters**
As you can see, networking really isnt my thing, lol

Thanks in advance
and sorry in advance if this gets moved to "Build your PC" I really didnt know which one to put this in.

[edfair]

You have more than enough horsepower. I didn't have my hands in it, but I was standing next to the guy that put RedHat 6.2 on a slower HP machine and used SSH (I think it was) as the filter. Went between the router and switch to limit incoming to an out of state fixed address. It wasn't pretty and I leaned some new cuss words standing there. But eventually it did work with HP machines on both ends and nothing hit any of the systems that were hiding behind it.

[glc]

You can make a firewall on a 486 with Linux on a floppy disk and 2 nics. Horsepower is not an issue. Your only issue is going to be exactly where to put it in your chain and how to configure it being that you have wireless to deal with, it's probably going to have to go between your modem and your router.

[Winnipesaukee]

I would also need another ethernet card (I only have 1 now) right?

[Tin]

yes, you will need another card. a good OS to use is Smoothwall...which can be found at www.smoothwall.org. its a Linux distro whos sole purpose is network protection.

[Winnipesaukee]

Thanks a ton guys I'll keep you all posted on the "project", and maybe write a how to.. "a step to take to secure your network"? I will put Smoothwall on it, as I do have some knowledge of *nix

anyway......
any ideas for a paint scheme?

I was thinking flames over a brick wall, and at the bottom, "THE Firewall"

[Tin]

just stash her away in a closet or something....out of sight. youre using an oldie there...shes a work horse.