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ClosedBSD 1.0b Released
An unnamed reader submits: "Joshua Bergeron released ClosedBSD 1.0B today. ClosedBSD is a firewall which boots off of a single floppy diskette, and requires no hard drive. It is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as it's native ruleset manager. Best of all: it is freely available under the BSD License. ClosedBSD also features an advanced curses based configuration utility for designing and managing firewall rulesets: Screenshots available.
Well, do we really need 31 flavors of Linux? :)
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Seems to me like these guys should pool together and try to merge the best of everyone's toolset.
Probably, but then again, that could be said for any of the millions of other projects out there.
How many editors do we really need? Window managers? Databases? Web browsers? MP3 encoders? CD players? Etc...
The big power of using a *nix on my home machine is setting everything up _just_ like I want it, from the shell to the WM to the browser. My Linux box looks completely different from anyone else's that I know, but it works perfectly for me.
--saint
do we really need n+1 floppy-based firewalls ? ... IMO it's better to get a 1gb harddrive to install the full freebsd distribution, not only a kernel and some stuff, because you'll have a lot more possibilities to play around with ;) ... for example in case of a harddrive failure, you put in the floppy, and your firewall/gw is back up and running in no time!
... it's very hard to mix different things together to get one good thing. Suppose you want to buy a new stereo, and you put together the best product from each of the big companies (f.e. the amplifier from JeVeCe, the MP3 player from sonie, the speakers from YXC)... when you put the thing together you'll experience a lot of problems due to incompabilities between the different parts. With software, it's the same, merging is tough and requires a big effort ...
Perhaps yes, perhaps not
On the other hand, they're useful, if you need a firewall/gateway solution in very short time
Seems to me like these guys should pool together and try to merge the best of everyone's toolset.
Nope, there i can't really agree
- Don't get upset, it's just _my_ opinion!
Life sucks.
No kidding. I feel like saying FOR FUCKS SAKE, WHY USE A FLOPPY? It's 2002, I think we can move beyond an aged, failure prone media. Read this recent slashdot discussion and why I think floppy based distros are shit. It's just a stupid idea.
What does a new hard disk cost? Peanuts. Is reliablity something that nobody cares about? All the tired arguments "Oh, you only use the floppy at bootup" and "Don't reboot it!" are pointless. Fact is, the thing could fail, and you'd not know it. Besides, does nobody keep log files anymore? I would think that the prevailing common sense would be to keep logfiles and update software now and then.
No sig is worth reading.
I'm sorry but it is months ago since I've used a floppy. And that was to test out PicoBSD. I would be much more happy to see a bootable cd-rom based thingie, which would allow me to put some bigger stuff on it, like sshd, tcpdump, trafshow, ngrep et al. Despite that it is only a firewall, I need these tools to debug stuff.
bash$