[CLUE-Tech] Small network security distro recommendations?

[David Anselmi]

skipworthy at realivetech.com wrote:
[...]
> Okay- Maybe I need to revise and clarify.

Good idea.

> I'm staying away from the big distros (Red Hat, etc)  becuase they're more
> than I need and want, bloated and harder to secure. Debian in particular ,
> stable and loyalty inspiring as it is, is too far behind the curve as well.

Debian testing is perfectly stable (no pun intended) and up to date for 
a firewall.  You might call the Debian mirrors bloated, but it isn't 
hard to get an install with the bare minimum packages that *you* want.

Look at the list of things you originally posted.  X and a window 
manager?  Plenty bloated for a firewall to me.

> What I'm looking for is something along the lines of Coyote or LRP with more
> (for lack of a better term) firepower.

LRP was long dead last I checked.  Maybe resurrected by now...  Unless 
you're specifically looking for a boot from floopy/CD distro I think 
Debian meets your requirements.  You have the flexibility that you can 
pick and choose what you want in it without being constrained by the 
firewall mentality (if I were serious about a firewall, I wouldn't run X 
or logging on it -- so probably firewall distros won't either).

A firewall should have only what you need on it and nothing else (good 
advice for any server).  Of course if you don't know what you need, or 
want to see what someone else has done, the firewall distros might be fine.

For that, Gibraltar has always seemed nice to me.

Dave