Re: Is there anything wrong with sticking with Lenny?
Jason Hsu put forth on 2/22/2011 7:35 PM:
> Thanks for the help on upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. It's hard to understand everything in the release notes, so it will take me some time to make the transition.
>
> Is there anything wrong with sticking with Debian Lenny? Does Debian shut down support for old versions like Ubuntu does? As I mentioned before, Debian Squeeze does not work on my old computer (1.0 GHz processor, 256 MB of RAM) even though Debian Lenny and antiX Linux M8.5 (based on Debian Squeeze) have no problems working on the same computer. It's a shame given that old computers normally work well as servers and firewalls.
>
> Learning to set up a firewall and server AND learning to properly upgrade Debian is too much for me to undertake at once. So what I'm going to do is set up my old computer as a firewall and server in Debian Lenny. I'll set up Lenny in VirtualBox on my newer computer (which is 5 years newer and has much higher specs) and upgrade Lenny to Squeeze. Once I've mastered both of these tasks (firewall/server on the old computer and Lenny to Squeeze upgrade in VirtualBox), I'll upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze on the old computer. If that doesn't work, I'll do a fresh installation of Lenny on the old computer, upgrade it to Squeeze, and then set it up as a firewall/server.
Forget the server part and just make it a firewall. You'll probably
need two NICs, one for public and one for private. Use IPCop or
SmoothWall instead of Debian. They're both purpose built Linux firewall
distros and very easy to setup and use. Both have a web administration
GUI for configuring all aspects of the firewall, viewing graphs of
traffic trends and all other kinds of neat stuff.
http://www.ipcop.org/
http://www.smoothwall.org/
The two are very similar and have the same roots. SmoothWall offers a
commercial version with official paid support. IPCop does not.
Commercial paid support for IPCop comes strictly from 3rd parties. In
your case I'm guessing you don't want paid support, so either should be
just fine for you. Both will be better as dedicated firewalls than
building a f/w from scratch with Debian.
--
Stan
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