A small revision, the frst was in HTML format... sorry for that Hi,
I just set up a linux firewall at home, but I'm a little confused about its type of platform. 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. 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. I first discovered the problems trying to login using SSH from work (or whatever location), it disconnected me immediately without any further response. When I tried to login onto the firewall locally it directly came up with a message like: 'Error in /sbin/login', and a library-file is mentioned (will look it up if it appears again). 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, but mainly I'm interested if people have experiences with this combination of hardware/OS, and if anyone has some tips on making this setup a bit more stable, though I can understand people saying that I should buy a 486 for a few bucks ;) Thanks, Tijl
