Re: Cisco 2501 & Squid 1.1.9 (fwd)

John Todd wrote:

> > I think the only thing you're going to find that's cheaper than
> > the Alteon box is a Linux/BSD box with multiple ethernet cards. :-(
>
> Agreed, but I don't like the management issues of putting
> spinning disks and PCs in the way of my traffic as a router.

Who said that you need spinning disks to run a Linux box as a router??
It easily fits on a single floppy loaded into ram at boottime. (replace
the floppy with a flashcard if you don't like booting from floppy
drives). And regarding a PC, i doubt that you can't find PC hardware
with good enought quality for a reasonable price.

Required hardware:
* A decent motherboard (with a CPU ;-)
* Some memory. 32MB will do in most situations. It could require some
more if heavily used as a transparent proxy redirector.
* A floppy drive (or bootable flashcard reader).
* Some kind of graphics card is probably required by the BIOS.
* A watchdog timer

A keyboard + monitor is not required. Linux can use a serial port as
console, and so can the bootloader (LILO), and most modern BIOS does not
require a keyboard.

Required software:
* A minimal system optimized for networking
* A small transparent-proxy program (the kernel can currently only
redirect the port to a local socket, I think there is a patch available
to work around this).
* A small runtime watchdog.

---
Henrik Nordström