9fans archive / 2000 / 06 / 98 /    prev next

From: "Russ Cox" <rsc@pla...>
Subject: Re: [9fans] Plan9 NAT network firewall on a 386?
Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2000 15:33:19 -0400

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