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Since you're obviously a /. reader, you must have AT LEAST heard of Linux. My suggestion is to get something like freesco on a 486, or possibly on a newer box with red hat or similar...

-theKGB 8)

Surfing on @Home behind a Packard Bell 486 running Freesco

Many agree that Mandrake is the distro of choice for ease of use and for those who wish to use it as a home OS.

Redhat is quite good for use as a server. They have excellent support for this.

Debian and Slackware are touted as being the purest forms of linux, so you have to do all the configurations yourself. Slower learning curve, but more to learn because youhave to know what you are doing.

Freesco is a nifty little no frills version of linux that will turn an old 486 into a firewall/router for you.

You should really check out demolinux. It runs totally off a CD. You don't even need a hard drive, so you don't have to install it. But you can check out what linux does in a consequence free environment. (It's the Debian edition)

I'm a fairly proficient Unix/Linux admin, and I was fighting script kiddies left and right on my home machine for several years (I got rooted twice over three years). I was running my main Linux box with masquerading and filtering for a couple of other PCs and my laptop, at first on ISDN and then on cable. The only reason I didn't install a dedicated firewall at home all that time was because it felt cumbersome, like it would take up extra space and electricity and just be overkill for the small "home" network sitting behind it.

But finally I just got tired of being scanned all the time and seeing people always trying things, so (not wanting to shell out $$$ for a commercial firewall/router), I got some spare parts: a 486DX4/100 board, 16MB ram, a floppy, and two 3Com 3c509 cards. Basically, spare parts.

I bolted the parts all into a cardboard box (it works, just find a stiff box, poke holes in it with a screw driver, and use washers with your screws). Then, I put Freesco (which is Linux-based) on a floppy disk and put the box between my local network and the outside world.

It's been running for a year now and I haven't even thought about it since. Not a single outsider has even come close to touching my PCs -- the Freesco 486-cardboard-box firewall/router has worked very well and I have yet to have to manually reboot it.

We love old 486/Pentium boxes here! Our firewall runs on freesco and thanks to the LTSP project, we have equipped everyone's desktop with a low-cost X terminal. There is a write-up of what we have done for anyone who cares. The beauty is that we have incredibly low cost-of-ownership, don't care if anyone breaks in and steals the stuff and it is totally silent in operation. The biggest complaint in the office now is the noise of the damn clock ticking. It has been a wonderful experience, they don't break down, you can boot one up from anybody's desk and get your own desktop ... send me as many as you have got!!

Besides LRP and Freesco, how about digital cameras? Let's see - Panasonic manufactures the only digital camera that can store hundreds of thousands of images on a single floppy. Sounds pretty cool to me! Of course, you have to have a compatible drive in your computer to read the disk, so Panasonic makes sales in both areas.

Just off the top of my head, the already-mentioned Linux Router Project, the freesco project, Tom's (very cool) rtbt, etc. I use tomsrtbt all the time as an emergency rescue floppy, and I can only imagine all the cool stuff he could do with ~16-18 times more disk space (the level of functionality already acheived in 1.7Mb is amazing)...

Heck, imagine having a floppy-based install where you don't have to disk swap for more drivers to enable networking? Slackware might actually be able to use disk sets other than A and N again on floppies... (not that I hold that against them, trying to fit things like X onto floppies is just silly in a masochistic sense) And I don't think it'd be too long before somebody makes a ZipSlack analog for this new tech.

And all the ram-based/cdrom-based distros (i.e. ones that load into ram off a floppy like LRP or the demo linux projects) would have a cool new way to enable persistant storage of more than the smallest things (e.g. logging in HD-less LRP systems).

But seriously, why sit around and debate which operating systems are better? The industry will decide who lives and who dies. Personally, I run OpenBSD, but that didn't stop me from trying out Linux. Now, I'm looking at Freesco for that old 486 box in the corner.
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Sorry to reply to my own post, but as a second thought, try FreeSCO which is a free linux based router - it probably isn't quite as compact as you're looking for, but runs nicely on modest hardware, and couldn't be easier to set up. A couple of low end pentiums with a pair of net cards in slimline cases would probably do the job nicely.

Ah, but what you're forgetting is that with the proper cognitive ehancement utilities, dogs and other pets could indeed get to the same level of intelligence as humans. For example, perhaps a silicon chip, containing a multiphase device which interacts with electrons containing the entire base of human knowledge. Now, the dog would have access to all of that, and , perhaps a second electron containing algorithms on how to talk, do math, etc.then, these would be interfaced to the dog's normal brain through a Dog Brain API, which would be run (the interface controller) by a microcomputer running Freesco , to route between normal brain synaptic connections and human-info driven connections. Therefore, the dog might be able to comprehend at least the level a highly intelligent human could .

SO you take a great general purpose OS, Linux, and then stick it on expensive propietary hardware, a CISCO router, to replace the router-optimized OS already there.

Of course, a 486 running Freesco, a Linux derived firewall router, would probably have better performance and be far cheaper, but it's not as hackworthy.

Next week, a Linux router/firewall on a wristwatch, but you can't move your arm or your network will go down.

I've never brought up a linux based router more quickly than with Freesco and it fits on a single floppy. Cool!

Freesco.org is a rocking router too. I like the nice setup features and flexibility. Just my opinion.

Whateva floats your boat...
My bolognie has a first name, its L_I_N_U_X.

If all you want is a small box to connect you to the net I can't reccomend Freesco enough (it's nothing to do with SCO)
<p>It's so easy to set up that someone who'd never heard of UNIX can do it, and it's a dead reliable way of connecting your home/small office network or whatever to the net, AND it all fits on a floppy. Been connecting our house for about a year now, the only time it's gone down is when the floppy drive in our aging 486 broke.

Sounds like Freesco (I have a copy running on a 486 25 meg box). Its a router that fits on one disk and can do a lot of nifty things (ie. bridge, router, firewall, dialup/in server, tunneling...)

You are a unique individual...just like everyone else.

For more here's a few good sites that list distros. That's how I usually find new ones.

linuxlinks.com

Linux Weekly News

linux.com

Mine is running on a 486, no probs. Our LRPs at work run P100 full 100mbps, so I assume a freesco on a P100 will be similar.

Scott

"...hardware such as those old 386s can be put to use." Yeah, right. What recent version of Linux will run on a 386 with maybe 8 Meg of RAM (but probably only 4) *and* fit on that under 528M hard drive that's the biggest thing the mobo's BIOS will take? I've got some old hardware I'd like re-use.

There are a bunch of "micro" Linuxes out there that are designed to run entirely on a floppy like Trinux, although they recommend at least 12MB RAM... &nbsp There's also the Linux Router Project and FreeSCO for using Linux as a router (which is what alot of the old 386s and 486s are used for). &nbsp For a list of full blown distributions, you can go here. &nbsp This is pretty cool.