knoppix transparent firewall

**true1ever** · 05-16-2003, 04:47 PM

Would be great if there was a version of knoppix using patched kernel for bridge firewalling (http://bridge.sourceforge.net/download.html) so that one could easily set up a totally transparent firewall using a machine with no hard drive. The iptables rules can be copied from another machine after bootup and since no configuration is stored locally on the firewall it basically can't be compromised or allow any backdoors to be installed.

**rickenbacherus** · 05-16-2003, 05:01 PM

Now I'm not sure what directions Knoppix may take in the future but there are already several diskless router distros out there both on floppy and cd. I don't see how Knoppix would benefit from this ability as a bootable router distro needs to be minimal in size and a GUI is unnecessary. My diskless router operates on 16M RAM which wouldn't even boot Knoppix, what's more there is no cdrom drive.

**true1ever** · 05-16-2003, 07:06 PM

I know there are other bootable firewall distros out there but I don't think that any of them use bridge firewalling. This feature gives you the ability to put a firewall transparently on the network with no changes made to any server or workstation or router configuration. It won't even show up in a traceroute.

Even though you dont need GUI for a firewall it sometimes might be nice to have for some fw configuration utils, nessus, etc, or you could always boot up in text mode if you don't need GUI.