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What
hardware do I need?
Before you install
NetBSD/i386 Firewall, you need to know if you've got all the
equipment you're going to need.
Here's the hardware you
need, step by step:
- A spare
computer. This
won't have to be a sophicticated modern speed monster,
just a working PC you have lying around doing nothing is
enough. In the left column you'll find a link with
supported hardware that has a exhaustive list of the
hardware that is supported by NetBSD. This list has a lot
of stuff your Firewall is not going to need, because it's
the full list of hardware suppored by the full version of
NetBSD, and people use the NetBSD operating system for a
lot of things. Below is the list of things you do really
need.
- Two
Ethernet cards.
One will connect to your cable or ADSL modem, one to your
own private network.
- An Intel
80386 CPU. (or
one more recent, like the 80486, Pentium, AMD, K6,
Celeron, Athlon, etc). As you can see, it doesn't have to
be too fast. Of course, if you're going to support a lot
of computers browsing the Internet, you may need a faster
Firewall.
- 8 MB of
memory. More is
always useful, the firewall will use it for temporary
storage. If you're going to support a lot of computers
browsing the Internet, you may need more. Most unused
computers will have at least 8, so chances are you won't
have a problem finding this..
- 40 MB hard
disk space.
Again, more is usefull. The bigger the memory in the old
computer, the bigger the harddisk needs to
be.
- 1.44 MB
Floppy disk drive.
The installation program runs from two floppy disks.
After installation, you'll no longer need the floppy disk
drive.
- video
card. Most
computers will not work without one, but it can be the
cheapest VGA card you can find
- Maybe a
keyboard. During
installation you'll really need a keyboard, but if you
need one later depends on your computer. Not all
computers will start up if you remove the keyboard
(they'll give you the funny "no keyboard - press F1 to
continue" error), but usually you can turn off that
behavior in the BIOS setup. Refer to the computer
documentation on how to do that.
- Maybe a
monitor. During
installation you'll really need a monitor, but once the
firewall is running you may not need it. The firewall
will display diagnostic information on the monitor, but
for normal operation, you don't really need to look at
that. If you're tight for space where you want to put the
firewall, or if you don't have enough monitors to keep
one on the firewall all the time, that's
fine.
Here's some hardware you do
NOT need:
- 3D
graphics video card.
You're not going to play games on it, so that is
overkill.
- Sound
Card. There's no
reason for the firewall to need to make noises beyond the
standard beep all computers can make.
- CD-ROM
player (maybe).
The installation gets all its information from the
network. Although NetBSD is also available on CD, the
firewall software is small enough to download quickly.
Also, if your provider uses PPTP or PPPoE to connect, you
can only do the installation from CD.
After the installation is complete, you can remove the
CD-ROM player from the computer again.
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