[TriLUG] Linux Firewalls for Home LANs... How Come?

[John Beimler]

quotation from Scott Chilcote <scottchilcote at earthlink.net> [on 020319 20:45]:

> It's not like I didn't have some old hardware that I could have put to 
> work doing the same job.  But is there a great reason not to plunk down 
> $100 for an appliance for this purpose?

I have a linux box, and originally I did this with my 33.6k modem, when
you couldn't buy a box to be a firewall/NAT gateway for dial up.  I've
just kept it around since then, although I have seriously considered
replacing it with one of the small boxes.  The reason I haven't yet is
that the community wireless LAN movement interests me, and the easy way
to join into that would to add a wireless card to the linux router, and
it would work pretty easily.  But if I can find an easy way to
selectively share my wireless LAN, and have the tiny box, I'd much
rather go that route, even though my linux firewall is cool, and doesn't
really require much maintenance.

besides this is nifty:

admin at firewall:~$ uptime
  8:30pm  up 245 days,  4:31,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Peace.

john