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You think that's bad, here's another recent occurrence in the 'ways-to-skirt-the-GPL' campaign: Gibraltar is a Debian-based firewall-on-a-cd distribution with a particularly nasty Copyright notice attached:

The Gibraltar CD-ROM layout and the selection of packages are copyrightable work and are
copyrighted by Rene Mayrhofer as such.

It basically says "If you make a cdrom with the same selection of (GPLed) files on it, you're violating my copyright".

I also noticed that the latest version of Fedora includes similar language in their new click-through 'license agreement'.

Take a look at Gibraltar. It's a version of Debian designed for firewalls; it runs completely off of CD, so hackers have no hard drive to play with..

Gibraltar is a Debian-based CD firewall distribution. It is freely available and I use it on several boxes. There is supposed to be an upcoming version with a web interface that will cost around $100.

I set up a server/firewall... Red Hat made a liar out of me.

First off, that's the reason the number one most important rule even in a small business is that the *firewall* is not the *server*. I really hate the fact that a certain company in Redmond likes to advertise that their small business offering can perform this dual role adequately. I usually put Gibraltar, which is a Debian-based run-from-cd firewall distro, on whatever spare computer is lying around that can handle it.

The firewall can (and should) be updated frequently; an internal server should not. I just use RH 7.3 on internal servers that don't provide outside access and reside on fairly small, trusted networks. I'm guessing that you run some sort of web hosting provider, though, from the fact that you say it's a 'small business' yet have more than 12 RH servers.

If that's the case, well, I don't know what to tell you. I think RH should have a webserver edition. The WS version of RH Enterprise says it comes with Apache, so maybe that's what it's targeted for. It can be had for as little as $180.

I can certainly say I feel for people who in this sort of situation. I started concentrating on deploying nothing but Debian a little over a year ago. It's by no means a difficult leap to go from RH to Debian, but, depending on the amount of help and support for commercial apps you require, sticking with RH might be worthwhile.

Gibraltar is a really good free firewall IMHO. Boots from CD, reads config from floppy, and you're not trapped in some limitative gui like with 'SuSE fw on CD' and similar stuff. Just fiddle until it feels right, then issue 'save-config' and the entire /etc (plus ~root) gets saved to the floppy. You could even write protect the floppy if you can afford to travel to the fw each time you want to save the config.

Gibraltar is pretty much what you just described. It worked very well for me in the past, although it looks like development has slowed down (no updates, at least to the free version, in over a year).

Yeah, that does suck. I was just looking for this yesterday, to use with Gibraltar Firewall. Many home users still use 95/98/Me and upgrading a gaming PC to Windows 2000 is like pulling teeth compared to installing a third-party VPN client.

Gibraltar is a nice debian boot-from-CDrom/run-off-CDrom distribution geared towards firewalls.

Hope this helps

David

I'm running gibraltar -- does anyone else, what do you think? It's cd based and creates a ram disk for all the config, saving them to floppy on shutdown. I got it running in 1/2 an hour, no trouble.