[mdlug] linux firewall/vpn package like monowall

[Michael Mol]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 11:20 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-05-14 at 11:01 -0400, Dan Pritts wrote:
>> Hi all -
>>
>> got a query from my brother.
>> he wants to host an app at a cloud provider (looking at rackspace).
>> the data is hipaa protected, so he's understandably leery about
>> security.
>> one suggestion he got was to have a pair of VMs, one running the app
>> and another running as a dedicated firewall/VPN.
>
> Linode offers some kind of private network / back-end.  I've never used
> it.  That can be used for database replaction, building fail-over
> systems, etc....
> <http://blog.linode.com/2008/03/14/private-back-end-network-support/>
>
>> any suggestions for relatively simple firewall/vpn configuration tools
>> that can be installed in a VM image from one of the big distros?
>> rackspace in particular provides a fairly comprehensive list of linux
>> distros, but from what i can tell you can't just install your own
>> distro in a VM.  So, a dedicated distribution like monowall wouldn't
>> work.  iirc monowall is freebsd-based anyway, but you get the idea.
>
> I don't see any purpose or role for these dedicate purpose
> distributions.  I just install a minimal OS and then install the
> packages I need - that isn't hard.  On openSUSE / SUSE the Yast
> administration tool will setup 99.44% of what you need.  Yast supports
> OpenVPN and (I believe) IPsec.

The chief advantage to dedicated-purpose distros: You don't need to be
fluent with what it does in order to get the thing to work.

The chief disadvantage to dedicated-purpose distros: You can't get the
thing to do what you want once you're fluent with what it does.

-- 
:wq