How To: Build a firewall from a junk PC to protect networks

Systm is the Do-It-Yourself show designed for the common geek who wants to quickly and easily learn how to dive into the latest and hottest tech projects. They will help you avoid pitfalls and get your project up and running fast. In this DIY episode, see how to build a firewall from a junk PC to protect networks.

If it's got a 386 processor and 32MB of RAM, and you can find a pair of Ethernet cards, you can turn that Junk PC into a serious Firewall to protect your network.

Ah, the wonder that is IPCop... a free Open Source firewall you can run on 'junk PC' hardware.

We walk you thru the installation on this episode of Systm: It'll keep your network seriously safe.

But don't take our word for it: InfoWorld gave it a Best of Open Source Security Award for aka a 'Bossie' for Best Firewall and PCPro gave it Five Stars in their review.

It's essentially a stripped down and focused Linux distribution that does nothing but stateful packet inspection, Snort intrusion prevention, IPSec VPN, and plug holes bad gals on the Internet might use to get on your network).

The main trick in setting up IPCop, after, of course, you've found an old Intel/AMD/Cyrix/Via/whichever machine that still runs, is securing a couple of compatible Ethernet cards... check cards against the IPCop Hardware Compatibility List before you buy 'em!

You can download it here... we prefer the ISO version you can burn to a bootable CD-ROM, it's called "ipcop-1.4.18-install-cd.i386.iso"

Search Systm on WonderHowTo for more tech episodes from this Revision3 show.