This is more a kudos than a question, however, there will be a couple of questions in here somewhere.
I live in the country, and dialup just was not cutting it. Not the least of which was that I had to order extra services from the phone company just to dial the 'net (major $$$). I purchased a sierra wireless aircard 875, snd I had a need for a CD based firewall with a 2.6 kernel to run on a headless computer. I could not find anything that worked, then i stumbled upon Finnix. I downloaded and burned Finnix 89.1 to a cd, and promptly set about modifying it. I used apt-get to install ntp, and dnsmasq. I modified isolinux.cfg to automatically boot after 5 seconds, snd to turn off most services. Then I modified inittab, resolv.conf, ntp.conf, dnsmasq.conf, finnix-autoconfig, network/interfaces, and a few others I cannot think of right now. I also created a new init.d/network because I did not like the way init.d/networking was set up. I created init.d/iptables with Easy Firewall Generator, a script I found on the 'net. I then nodified it to suit my needs better. After that, I download some pppd scripts from sierra wireless, modified them, and created a script to start pppd (init.d/pppd-gsm). After a couple of days of work (well several actually, I'm disabled), I now have a fully functional firewall. I still need to clean things up, tweak iptables, and delete unused programs, but it works! All ports show up as stealth on the shields up! website and dslreports shows that I am getting between 50Kbps and 220Kbps throughput.
Now, some cavaets:
I am not a "EXPERT" on linux by no measure of the word, but I have been using it for several years, and full time for the past 3 years. I am used to RedHat/Fedora distro's and not debian. The problems I am having are listed below.
Is there a easy way to change the timezone in Finnix? Fedora uses a timezone file in /etc which has the name of the locale in it (America/Chicago). The only thing I found in Finnix, is a TZ variable in finnix-autoconfig, that was set to UTC. Is this the correct place to adjust this? Is there a easier way to adjust settings in finnix WITHOUT continually editing finnix-autoconfig?
My time on the firewall computer is now six hours in the future.
I'm sure that it is in my scripts, but if init.d/network starts before init.d/iptables, the network card will not get a ip address from network/interfaces, even though it is set to auto in network/interfaces. Start init.d/iptables, then init.d/network, and it works perfectly. I had the same problem when I was using init.d/networking.
I beleve that dnsmasq's problems are in iptables. dns fowarding works, but I cannot get a dhcp request to reply even though it is turned on in dnsmasq.conf.
I had ntp working before dnsmasq was installed, but it stopped working just as soon as dnsmasq was installed.
Yes, I know the last two are not part of finnix, but if somebody has some experience in these areas, I would appreciate it. Let me know what you need, and I will provide it.
Mark Cason