byUsers Forums

If I correctly  understand what you are trying to do then I use a similar setup although not to improve firewall throughput but to run my sons torrents, downloads etc on a low power machine.

Use it for  local media streaming direct to web enabled devices (again to save running a 500w PC just to listen to a bit of music)
Also useful for remote connection when I'm away.

I run Ubuntu server edition on a Compaq 700UK laptop (Duron 700 with 512MB Ram) - probably one of the worst laptops ever sold.  - now there's a topic for discussion.

Ubuntu server was quick and easy to customise and install. With only the required applications installed its been running now for 3 months 24/7 with no interference.

I run it behind my router firewall but it would equally work as a firewall in its own right and will do everything you want.

I tried a couple of server variations but none were as flexible or as easy to use.

I can't stand Toshibas.

Trouble, is I can't stand them for all the wrong reasons - back when speedstep and the like were not available I remember a Toshiba laptop which had a nifty hardware / software feature which would dynamically adjust the CPU speed to optimise battery life. The guy who owned it loved the battery life, and give them their dues in general, the design is usually pretty sharp.

Trouble was, without the software the laptop defaulted to the slowest speed. The software only ran on whatever version of Windows was current back then and it was pretty horrible to use....

I use Puppy Linux all the time - mainly because its a 100mb live CD - but when I put it on the hard drive it boots in about 20 seconds! I've found hardware support to be good - not perfect, but good.

It's Working!

I finally got Ubuntu onto the notebook, and recognising both its NICs, simply by re-installing in "advanced" mode. I didn't choose anything different from the automated install, but it made the PCMCIA NIC work.

A couple of straightforward entries in ufw (Ubuntu's firewall manager) to allow SSH and BT traffic, a copy of rtorrent, and we're off. The notebook and NAS are running almost silently in the sitting room (unless I stress the notebook and its fan kicks in), I can access the notebook from the Internet, I can access the NAS from the notebook on its LAN (as opposed to WAN) interface through a little switch, and can access it from the rest of the LAN by powering on the switch that connects the little switch to the rest of the house.

No more than 300 kbytes per second peak download rate so far (peak throughput on my ADSL router is 2200 kbps down), rate-limited to 50 kbytes up per second (400 kbps on the router), so it's not stressing the link.

I run rtorrent using screen, so I can (optionally) detach the session and grab it (with screen -x rtorrent) from wherever I log in, whether locally on the notebook, SSH from the LAN or SSH from the Internet.

I tried to use moblock, but it blocked access to the trackers - my error, without doubt - so I've given up on that. Also I followed the recommended sizing for filesystems, and / is now 95% full with only 18MB free, which is a bit rubbish, because it means I can't install linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic-pae (it fails with:

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/linux-image-2.6.31-20-generic-pae_2.6.31-20.58_i386.deb (--unpack):
 failed in buffer_write(fd) (10, ret=-1): backend dpkg-deb during `./lib/modules/2.6.31-20-generic-pae/kernel/drivers/pcmcia/pcmcia_core.ko': No space left on device

)

I had a look at using lvresize to take some space from /home and give it to / using the Logical Volume Manager, but e2fsresize complained about the result, insisting e2fsck was needed, so I bottled out and reverted things.

Still, it's working pretty much as I intended, so I shall leave it running rather than try to "fix" it.