Old laptop usage

[Linux Frank]

Hi All,

I've got an old Toshiba Laptop. specs are as follows.

P133, 40MB RAM, 1GB HD. If it has anything else of note then I do not know what it is. Oh yes sound appears fubar, and battery long since dead. Only runs when connected to the mains.

I am thinking of picking up a couple of PCMCIA cards and turning the thing into a firewall.

Will the slow processor and low mem cause any lag from packets in and out of the firewall?

Can anyone vouch for the durability of a firewall on 24/7 that is actually a laptop. This thing runs very warm but not hot.

Obviously no graphics. This thing will do nothing else but filter incoming packets. Blocking ports and maybe setup with samba and spam assassin, network resolution (DHCP) type of stuff. Other side will be anything from 1 to 6 comps, a webserver (not expected to be that busy).

Opinions welcomed. Thanks in advance.

[Void Main]

As far as for just being a firewall that is plenty of machine. Depending on what else you want to use it for (web/samba/etc) may cause it to be slower if you start paging becuase of low memory. But for just a firewall it would keep up with anything you could throw at it. The only other issue I can see is life expectancy when leaving it up 24x7, laptops usually aren't built for that, but who knows....

[Linux Frank]

Lifespan is not a major issue. This is experimental at first, and if it is still around after 1 year I'll be v. happy. My primary concern is whether a laptop is up to 24/7 operation, and whether it is worth investing the money (all 20-30 bucks) for two PCMCIA network cards, versus giving my roomie $100 for his old PII 400MHz.

I think it will only be a firewall. With 40 MB of memory I'm guessing that even a small app will have it swaping like mad, especially if it has to deal with multiple connections.

[Calum]

did you see panos'article about putting linux on his toshiba laptop? it'ssomewhere on the promote-opensource.org site, although i don'tknow where...