I have a small mobo I am thinking about using as a router..My network has 3 PC's, all currently connected to a linksys router which I can't stand. Since this mobo can only support 3 ethernet ports (unless I go dual nic PCI), I'll have to use USB interface for the cable modem..how is *nix support for cable modem's with USB interface? Also, which Unix...OpenBSD was my first choice.. as it would be a gateway to which two linux PC's and a Windows box sit.

*bump*
Ah! What about a USB to ethernet converter?
A little more expensive but would it
make what I'm doing easier?

You only need two NICs in a router - one external, connected to your cable modem, and one internal, connected to a switch. You should be able to use your existing router as a switch; just don't use the WAN port.

OpenBSD kicks ass, but be ready to do a ton of reading. PF is fairly easy to configure, but building a good ruleset takes time. Most of the stuff is out there, however. The documentation on the OpenBSD site is some of the best I've seen.

Quote: Original post by jdhardy
You only need two NICs in a router - one external, connected to your cable modem, and one internal, connected to a switch. You should be able to use your existing router as a switch; just don't use the WAN port.

OpenBSD kicks ass, but be ready to do a ton of reading. PF is fairly easy to configure, but building a good ruleset takes time. Most of the stuff is out there, however. The documentation on the OpenBSD site is some of the best I've seen.

Damn skippy, I've got OpenBSD running as my firewall at home on an old Sparc 5 pizza box and that thing is pretty much bulletproof. Took a little while getting the initial rule set done but I have a bunch of oddball stuff in it such as loading a table of banned outright IP addresses (4000 or so that are known spyware offenders and I update that periodically) As lines in a ruleset that would stink adding all that manually but with it setup as a table in the pf.conf, I just have to put the list out there as an ascii file and point the table configuration in the ruleset at that file that I have lovingly named /etc/sh*tlist (without the asterisk of course)

That old box is at least 10 years old and still cranking away. Not much good for a server (God help you if you tried to run Solaris on it, even 2.6 is a pig on that machine with 192MB) but for a DSL firewall, it works spectacularly, never any hickups from OpenBSD at all. (I can't say the same for user error, had the vents on the side a little to close to the side in my rack and it started overheating. Amazing what 1/2" of space did to fix that problem though.

Quote: Original post by jdhardy
You only need two NICs in a router - one external, connected to your cable modem, and one internal, connected to a switch. You should be able to use your existing router as a switch; just don't use the WAN port.

OpenBSD kicks ass, but be ready to do a ton of reading. PF is fairly easy to configure, but building a good ruleset takes time. Most of the stuff is out there, however. The documentation on the OpenBSD site is some of the best I've seen.

What do you mean by 'external' exactly?
The whole point of this was to get rid of this router
too.

I've been trying to install openbsd on here..first,
right before it gave me the list of .tgz packages
to install (after selecting mirrors), it complained
that the kernel wasn't installed. I can't get passed
that part. I read the docs and it is something about
the openbsd 2.5 kernel needing to be in a seperate
partition at the first ~500 megs if the hard drive
is over 8 gigs.
Now..BOTH my PCI NIC's are dead so I can't even select
for mirrors.