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Try Soekris (http://www.soekris.com/); for example.
Get the Soekris version from
http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/download/floppyfw-3.0 /floppyfw-3.0.0/

No moving parts, no noise, less than 10 W.

Recommended.

I do. What is 'small' ? To me, it is P75 / P300 and 128 MB of RAM. Your turn to run a VM on it and said pfSense.
Have you read http://wiki.pfsense.com/wikka.php?wakka=ReleaseCav eats ? I am running a P233 with 64 MB RAM and get around 40 Mbits. Not as VM, of course, but plain OpenBSD.
On my Soekris 4801 I get a good 24 Mbits with http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ inclusive TC; from a floppy (if I so wanted).

And when I start looking at my production stuff, I don't want GUI; I don't want Live-CD and I don't want USB. And - of course - I don't want any off-the-shelf PC. And production seems what these guys are going for. Call me a wet blanket, but I seriously don't see what this whole thing is supposed to deliver. Seriously.

• Newsforge article on floppyfw and Coyote Linux
  
• SANS floppy-based firewall review
  

Wondershaper http://lartc.org/wondershaper/

Got known of it when it was included in the development branch of floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/ - A Linux-based router software package that fits on a floppy disk (yes, those 3.5" diskettes).

And to answer someone above questioning the performance of using a PC to route packets instead of dedicated hardware, it depends on what dedicated hardware you're talking about. For once I believe many of the $50 boxes out there are indeed quite poor in performance when compared to a reasonablty antique (say 486DX2-66) PC running a *nix router package.

But if you mean the $5000 layer 2 router, then I don't know.

per TFA, it looks like floppyfw http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/

With a small drive, you might be able to squeeze an early edition of Windows 95 onto it (I've done this but it's painful). However, Windows 3.1 will comfortable fit on such a drive just fine.

• http://www.toms.net/rb/
• floppy fw

OK so I haven't used a floppy in years and they're terribly unreliable, BUT it you can still run an entire linux distro off of one http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/

As much as I love tomsrtbt, it has saved my butt many times, it is not the whole answer to the poster's problems. tomsrtbt is first and foremost a rescue system. You'd have to go through a lot of mounting and manually starting the stuff you want up. What he wants is to boot from floppy (and tomsrtbt is not the only distro that does that) and get the rest of the system up from a USB stick. There is quite some work to be done before you get there.

Just use floppyfw. I did just that for a couple of years using an old COMPAQ LTE 5150 and two PCMCIA cards. Just takes a single floppy and I think now it supports out of the box PCMCIA without modifications.

FloppyFW

You can get build scripts for floppyfw:

Floppyfw development directory

It's the "devkit" and I must admit it's not perfect yet but people use it and I will provide a better and full development system for building your floppyfw from scratch (the devkit has this already but it is not perfect yet). It will also have build scripts for ISO/CD and CF.

So, it's possible to build floppyfw from scratch.

20 mb ram
one floppy drive
no hd
two isa nics

and floppyfw

not terribly old but it's in production. it was a great (and cheap) way to learn iptables.

The FloppyFW distribution is the one I use, personally. I found it to be quicker to get up and running than the LRP. Also, it is very flexible with the ability to add packages, etc. I have SSH running on my FloppyFW to give a poor-man's tunneling into my network from outside...

An actively mantained, full featured, modular and (if neccessary) very compact Linux distribution for building routers, firewalls, gateways and the like can be found here: floppyfw.

FloppyFW

Smoothwall GPL 2.0 Beta 4 (mallard)
http://smoothwall.org/beta/

I put three nics in a Pentium 90 that I found on a trash heap. One nic goes to my RR cable modem, one nic goes to my switch and one nic is for my son's Playstation 2.
I can control every aspect of the firewall from any pc on the green nic. The firewall pc doesn't even have a keyboard or monitor.

I can VPN through it with ease and I have port forwarding from an oddball port number to port 21 for a private FTP so that RR won't find it.

It's really easy to use and so far I've had no problems.
Of course ALL the machine inside of it are Linux boxes and all of them are using iptables (w/shorewall) so everything is really secure..

For a super easy, very cheap and very fast firewall try floppyfirewall at http://zelow.no/floppyfw

No worries here...

haha! thanks, but Im sticking with Windows

Fair enough, if it works for you.

I tried to look into linux a bit, but didnt/dont really have the time. At this point, if its not building on something I already know, there are other things I need to be doing. One thing I was disappointed with was not being able to use it on an old machine. I mean, when the base install is over 1gb, that kind of excludes using an old 486 w/ 250mb hd.

Many of the latest distros are certainly bloated, no argument about that. Then again, you wouldn't expect to be able to install this year's or even last year's version of Windows on a '486.

That '486 should work just fine with some of the special purpose distros floating around - like floppyfw or TSL.

Floppyfw is actually a (surprise!!) floppy based distro. But there is also an ISO image. I use it at home. I have friends that also use it for their networks. Works good. Easy to setup. From the webpage, the author claims he has used it for networks with thousands of computers. I wouldn't doubt it.

It says Dell can't sell a computer with "NO OS". What prevents Dell from simply making a floppyfw option? i.e. where does it say it has to me a MS operating system?

I use FloppyFW on an old k6 as a router and dhcp server.
I have no harddrives or cdroms in the machine to save energy.
Needless to say it works great.

Herbix : "Herbix is a Linux server that fits on a floppy. It supports ipchains and can serve FTP, HTTP, IRC, DHCP, SMTP, and IDENT."

Mike's Jukebox Distro : "Mike's Jukebox Distro is really just a floppy image that you add to a CD full of mp3's, using it as the El-Torito boot image. It has a complete Linux kernel and madplay, along with BusyBox. A simple shell script uses "find" to get a list of all mp3's on the CD, and it then plays each of them in order. tty3 is used for the player output, tty1, and tty2 have shells to allow the user to "play" while it's playing music."

RIMiRadio : "RIMiRadio is a floppy disk distro of Linux and an Icecast server."

floppyfw : "Floppyfw is a router and simple firewall on one single floppy. It uses Linux basic firewall capabilities, and has a very simple packaging system. It is perfect for masquerading and securing networks on ADSL and cable lines, using both static IP, DHCP, and PPPoE, and provides a simple installation, which usually involves editing of only one file on the floppy."

BBIagent Router : "BBIagent is a single floppy Linux-based router for sharing a broadband Internet connection. It also serves as a firewall to prohibit intruders from accessing your LAN. You can create your own BBIagent router software (a diskette file image) on our server based on your hardware configuration (NICs) and connection protocol (e.g. PPPoE, PPPoATM or DHCP). It is very easy to install and use."

Coyote Linux : "Coyote Linux is a single floppy distribution for people who have an Internet connection that they wish to share with other computers on a LAN. In addition to connection sharing, it also provides firewall services to help protect the internal network. The goal of the Coyote project is to make it as quick and easy as possible to share an Internet connection."

Tom's RootBoot : "rtbt is the most Linux on one floppy disk for rescue recovery panic and emergencies, contains tools to keep in your shirt pockets, is useful whenever you can't use a hard drive and contains about 100 rescue tools."

Pocket Linux : "Pocket Linux is an almost minimal, one floppy linux system designed to quickly convert PC workstation into secure linux-based workstation using ssh to connect to remote host (other networking clients are also supported). It supports bootp for determining host IP and other network parameters (there's also manual configuration possible, but bootp is recommended). In addition to workstations equipped with a network card (ethernet or arcnet), you can also use Pocket Linux on a PC equipped with a modem. Modem is automatically detected and then PPP connection is made."

Trinux : "Trinux is a minimal Linux distribution that boots from a single floppy or CD-ROM, loads its packages from an FTP/HTTP server, IDE filesystem, or additional floppies, and runs entirely in RAM. Trinux contains the latest versions of popular network security tools that can be used to conduct security research, analyze network traffic, and perform vulnerability testing."

Hopefully this list is helpful to those of you just starting to think about tiny distros.

FloppyFW is a linux distribution on a floppy that acts as a packet filtering firewall. I have floppyfw machines set up both at home and at work--one's a 486-50, the other's a Pentium 60--that protect my machines. It's great for those of us that have old computers with floppy disk drives sitting in the basement, and have to protect a computer or two running Winblows. http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw

• http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/
  
• http://ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/
  
• http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/
  
• http://www.xandros.net/
  
• http://www.gentoo.org/
  
• Smoothwall ...
  
• http://www.ipcop.org/
  
• http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/snf
  
• http://www.freesco.org/
  
• http://www.coyotelinux.com/
  
• http://leaf.sourceforge.net/
  
• http://www.gnatbox.com/Pages/gblight.html
  (this ones based on BSD IIRC)
  
• http://www.bbiagent.com/
  
• http://www.clarkconnect.org/"
  
• http://www.linux-firewall-tools.com/
  

FloppyFW, a linux distribution has been featured on slashdot several times, and works very well. It fits on a 1.44 floppy and has many ad-in modules including a DHCP and web server, as well as syslog. Versions on the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel, and active newsgroup support. Check it out.

Red Hat Linux binaries and source still fit on one DVD, some versions of Slackware fit on a CD-ROM, an LFS install can be squeezed into 8 MB, and floppyfw (Linux for a dedicated packet-filtering firewall) fits on a 1.4 MB floppy.

Amazing what queer pranks people invent in place of a rather obvious solution...

Get it here.
It uses only one floppy, that can be write protected,
and if console access isn't needed, you can remove
all cards (except network ones, hehe) and keyboard.
There are also packages to add features such as
syslogd, PPPoE, microhttpd, etc.
In the future I'm going to try it with those $50 solid
state disks. Could be a way to build cheap and
reliable firewalls.

Are you sure floppyfw doesn't have NAT or port forwarding? Maybe you should check again, because it works fine for me. I got it working with the help of this SysAdmin article. It talks about an older version of floppyfw, but it should still get you setup faster than mucking with LRP. Of course, YMMV.

I just went searching to buy 12 ISA ethernet cards last week, and was only able to buy 1 NE2000 for US$10 after visiting about 8 stores (Atlanta, GA). However, the 9th store (they carried new and used equipment) offered me 12 for free (3COM Etherlink III and Intel EtherExpress PRO) if I would accept used ones. I did, of course.

The old PC's are also a great value (Used P166 w/floppy, 16MB RAM, video, sound are selling for US$29) and pretty good performers.

Add some software like floppyfw [http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw/], and you have your firewall/router.

To make it quiet and low power:

clip the fan wires on the power supply (with no harddrive, no video or other cards, you should have no problem with overheating, especially in houses that have HVAC systems or climate control).

Activate any BIOS power saving (typically affects HD, video, printer port, etc.), and disable video.

Disconnect the keyboard or mouse.

The good thing about doing it yourself with an old PC is the amount of control that you get - you know what is inside (or at least could find out :-). It also might be fun for you to tinker (although it appears you view this as a hassel).

Regards,

Steve

Try floppyfw also.

This would have been a very short post except for the stinking lameness filter which has forced me to add this text in an effort to overcome the stinking lameness filter. I thought that was what moderators were for.

you think that you can fit everything that you need for a linux or windows bootup in 8MB of flash? You think that you can fit BOTH of them?

floppyfw (Firewall on a Floppy) runs a linux 2.4.5 kernel. It handles ipchains, iproute2, traffic shaping, and can retrieve ip's for all its nic's with dhcp. It's held on a 1.44 MB floppy, so yes, I think I can fit everything I need for a linux bootup in 8MB flash. I might not be able to store *all* the modules I need, but I can certainly store enough to start the machine with.

You mean you could build something like floppyfw

Try floppyfw. It's free, easy, works on a cheap box with no hard drive and is available here.

This is a simple distro (free!) that gets you up and running on a low-end system w/o a hard drive.

Get your Floppy Firewall at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw.

If it don't have what you want, you can always add more. But, if you add too much, you might have to add a hard drive.

This is a simple distro (free!) that gets you up and running on a low-end system w/o a hard drive.

Get your Floppy Firewall at http://www.zelow.no/floppyfw.

If it don't have what you want, you can always add more. But, if you add too much, you might have to add a hard drive.

Have a look at floppyfw