WinXP nailed by THREE trojanvirus when reinstalling to make room for Linux 8990

For most users, yes, these are a good deal. I certainly took advantage of that when I got our WAP. buttuming the rebates come, it should end up being $6.

I needed something a little more substantial than that, however. I've got an IPCop firewall set up in my basement. It's a PPro-200MHz machine, with 256MB RAM, and four NICs. (One for the cablemodem, one for the LAN, one for the WAN, one for the DMZ (my home webserver).) I've got things set up the way I feel I need.

The webserver's locked down - it can't get out on the net. The only thing it can do, network-wise, is respond to external requests. It can't even ping the firewall. The WAN stuff can get to the internet, but can't touch the LAN. If someone gets on there, they can't get at any critical machines. Machines on the LAN, of course, are protected but unrestricted.

I've never seen CPU usage more than 18% or memory usage more than about 10%. But I may take up some of that slack later, and set up a Dan's Guardian or similar proxy. I can't keep my kids from the seedier areas of the net forever, but I can certainly make it hard to do with my equipment. They aren't interested yet (the oldest is almost 6) but they will be eventually.

(Scary story: a friend of ours is basically a nanny-housekeeper for a nine and a thirteen year old. From what I gather, the 13-year-old boy had some girl the same age sending him... rather candid photos of herself. Not even Dan's Guardian can protect against that. :-)

-- Sincerely,

Ray Ingles (313) 227-2317

"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it." - Edmund Way Teale