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by Retro
My firewall box is an ancient 233 MHz DEC Multia. Don't let the clock speed fool you, it's a memory pig and not much faster than a Pentium 75. Aside from workstation performance that was impressive in 1994, it has been a real trouper, logging 90 days or more uptime between reboots, an utterly stable firewall that cost me thousands less than any competing product would have. Linux's built-in firewalling/IP_masquerade code is stronger and cheaper, if less friendly, than that available on NT and Solaris.
Downloading the Red Hat 5.0 Alpha release from Red Hat's primary FTP site took about 14 hours over 128K ISDN line. I used wget<\!s>-m (a GNU utility not included in the base Red Hat distribution) to pull down an exact duplicate of the Red Hat 5.0 directory tree. You can also use ncftp (bundled with Red Hat) with the -R option. If you are behind a firewall, you have to configure it to use PASV mode first.
CuteFTP and WinFTP32 for Windows 95/NT are also capable of doing this sort of mirroring, so don't think you need a Linux box just to download your free copy of Red Hat.
For those of you using a PPP modem or an ISDN connection, it's probably faster (and for those of you using metered lines, cheaper) to order the CD-ROM from Red Hat's convenient on-line ordering facility.
Unlike my friend's experiences, my upgrade to Red Hat Alpha completed with no trouble; however, my configuration was vastly simpler.
The Alpha installation process is still relegated to a pair of poorly written appendices in the manual. Red Hat's default kernel does not have firewalling completely enabled, so I had to first reconfigure the kernel.
Since I was going to have to wait an hour while my Alpha's kernel rebuilt anyway, I wanted to get its sound configured and working on this build as well. (I use the machine for network monitoring, and I wanted it to ``speak up'' whenever there was a problem, rather than beep.)
This was a bootstrapping problem--you can't get to the Red Hat mailing list archive to research your firewall box if your firewall box is down. So I configured named, uncommented the http Proxy support and added the correct ServerName to the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, restarted httpd, then proxied my browser to the firewall box--I now had full web support without IP masquerading.
RealAudio isn't included in the DEC Alpha release, which is too bad as the floating-point performance of the Alpha would probably improve the quality of live RealAudio encoding. Aside from these omissions, the Alpha release has the same features as the Intel version.
The Alpha worked fine until it was taken out by a lightning hit. Anybody got a spare power supply for this little workhorse?