Coyote Linux

[K2]

There's a website called 'Coyote Linux' - http://www.coyotelinux.com - and there's a very sweet lil piece of coding they have made available to the public.

Here's a cut n' paste from their site...

This product is a single floppy distribution of Linux that is designed for the sole purpose of sharing an Internet connection. The floppy can be created using either a Microsoft Windows "wizard", or by using a set of Linux shell scripts. In addition to being designed to have very low hardware requirements, the floppy release of Coyote Linux is able to provide the performance and uptime that is expected from any Linux based system...

Basically you can turn any computer, from a 386SX and up, into a fully-functional Linux-based router/firewall. The entire package runs off of a single floppy disk. All the computer needs is a CPU/mainboard, some memory, two nic cards, floppy drive and a power supply. That's it. Ya don't even need a vid card or monitor, hard drive, mouse or keyboard if you script the config file correctly. Just boot it up and let it run, done deal.

Got an old system laying around not doing jack? Need a decent router with a configurable firewall? Hmmm...

Check it out, post here if any of ya try it out or have used it before.

[Catalyst22]

LOL, I know this is an old post, but I wanted to give my $.02 on this. Its neat for the home user, but when I started at my company the guy before me tried to cut some corners so he used a floppy bootable router. I was told that he configured this just 3 months before I came on at the company. They had some minor issues with it and he had told them to reboot the computer when they had problems. This fixed their problems... for a while. When I came on I was out inspecting the sites and found that we had about 8 of these setups. One had a 250Gb hdd in it and a 1.5Mb up/down connection that the users complained about "being slow all the time". I replaced the PC with a Zywall 2xw vpn router off ebay for $190. I then noticed that they were getting totally hammered by traffic on IRC ports. I checked it out and found out that he was running an FTP server on this floppy disk. The local hard disk had something like 2Mb free and was full to the hilt with warez and porn. There were backdoor trojans on all the laptops and desktops in the office. Had to wipe and rebuild all of them. Thank god I didn't bring up my VPN tunnel before I found all this.

I do not know if the issue was caused by his configuration not being secure or by the fact that a DOS attack on an old PC can easily shut down your firewall thus opening ports onto your network and giving hackers free reign. Could be any number of things. The guy was an idiot and that was evident. So the only thing I have to say is that if you run this as your router solution you might as well go ahead and just get smoothwall and install it on the system. Keep a boot disk for this software on hand in case you have an issue and need to bring the router back up. Granted this is not something a real enterprise should ever use. It would be fun to play with, but smoothwall seems to be the better solution and its free and easy to config. I wouldn't be surprised if there is better out there, but I have been happy with it.