Re: [9fans] Plan9 NAT network firewall on a 386?

Re: [9fans] Plan9 NAT network firewall on a 386?

[Russ Cox]

A 386 at 25 MHz and 4MB should run okay
as long as you don't want to use graphics.
The answer is yes, you could do it, but you'd
have to make yourself a stripped down kernel
(toss the vga drivers, toss the graphics library,
maybe toss SSL) to have a comfortable amount
of user memory in which to play.  I would suggest
bringing the system up on a more powerful
machine to get acquainted and have a good
development environment.

No IP masquerading firewall exists for Plan 9,
but it would, I believe, not be too hard to get
such a thing working.  It would be much more
straightforward than is the case in, say, Linux,
due to the architecture of the IP stack and the
ability to have multiple completely separate
stacks.  If you chose to write such a thing, I'd
be happy to give you pointers.  I'd love to replace
a Linux firewall I run with such a setup.

As far as I know no IRC software has been ported,
but I suspect it's only a matter of time.

The disk space (170MB) is plenty for what
you want, but you'd have to pick and choose
pieces of the distribution (i.e. you'd probably
toss the fonts and ghostscript and perhaps
most of the sources).  I've set up minimal
but very usable Plan 9 laptops in under 50MB.

An even more interesting way to set things
up would be to have a file server or a cpu/file
server on your inside network and have the
Plan 9 firewall machine boot completely off
the internal network (that is, have no local
state on its disk other than the boot loader).

Russ

[9fans] Plan9 NAT network firewall on a 386?

[Per von Zweigbergk]

Hello.

This is my initial close contact to the world of plan9, and I don't know a
lot about it. I'm from a UNIX background, and I run Linux on my home
machines.

With that said, I can come to the main point of this post :)

I'm considering changing the operating system on my 386/25 with 4 MB of
RAM from Slackware Linux 3.9, to plan 9. The complete hardware of the
system is the following:

- Intel 386 at 25 mHz

- 4 MB of RAM (I don't think this can be extended, as there are only
four 30 pin SIMM slots, and bigger RAM chips are hard to get hold of in
this day and age.)

- A 170 MB IBM hard drive with an IDE interface.

- Two ISA network cards in non-PnP mode. NE2000 compliant off the shelf
stuff.
-- Network card 1 connected with a statically assigned IP to the
internal network.
-- Network card 2 connected to a cable modem with IP's assigned with
DHCP.


The tasks is has right now are:

- NAT (ip masquerading) firewall to let the network access the Internet.

- Telnet server four "outsiders" to connect to my workstations which are
more powerful.

- Emergency IRC machine. :)


Would this be possible to run on Plan9 rather than on Linux? I feel like
changing firstly for exploration... and possibly less bloat?

--
Per von Zweigbergk <pvz@iname.com> IRC: pvz (IRCnet, QuakeNet, EFnet, or
UnderNet -- choose your poison)