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Hi,
I just set up a linux firewall at home, therefore I
got an old PC of a friend of mine. It runs on 120MHz with 24MB/1GB but that
should be ok. I just have a little question about the platform I'm using. It's a
NexGen Nx586, I tried to install RedHat first (I had experience using that as a
firewall on some 'normal' machine) but it just kicked out the
installation-procedure after the first boot. Next I tried Mandrake and Suse,
both without any luck (though I figured out the PC just has too few memory
for mandrake to install)
I checked the hardware HOWTO and didn't read
anything about support to this platform, nor anything negative about it. I found
some (very few!) resources, mainly questions as well, about the Nx586. The only
thing that may be interesting to mention is that Linux recognizes the platform
as a 386 machine.
The situation now is as follows: I installed
debian, very minimal installation, and set up ipchains/ipmasq/portfw for my
internal network. Debian does run but there are mainly two errors which
regularly occur. The first is just a complete lock up of the firewall, with a
lot of nasty dumps. The second is a litle more weird. It doesn't lock up
(traffic between the internal network and the internet is possible, in both
directions) but I can't login in any way. When I first tried to login using
SSH from work (or whatever location) it disconnects me immediately without any
response, after asking for my passphrase. When I tried to login onto the
firewall locally it didn't even ask for a password, but directly gave me a
message like: 'Error in /sbin/login', and a library-file is mentioned (I'm sorry
I'm not at home now, but I could look up the message overthere). A similar thing
occurs when trying to shutdown the machine. If I press ctrl-alt-del at the same
time it tries to 'init' but then gives an error also. (means I have to reboot it
manually, and everything seems to work fine again, until the same thing
happens)
Any help would be appreciated, though I can
understand people saying that I should buy a 486 for a few bucks ;)
Thanks,
Tijl Schoonenberg
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