Old Laptop As Firewall

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OLAF (Old Laptop As Firewall) is a single floppy Linux distribution which allows an old laptop to be used as a firewall for dial-up internet connections. The hardware requirements for using OLAF are a laptop with a Pentium (or better) processor, 8MB of RAM, a supported 16-bit PCMCIA ethernet card, and a hardware modem (not a Winmodem.) No hard drive is required as OLAF boots into and runs from RAM.

The current version of OLAF is compiled with uClibc version 0.9.28 and contains up-to-date versions of the Linux 2.4.x kernel, Busybox, Iptables, pppd/chat, pcmcia-cs, and Dnsmasq. The system is configured for use by editing a plain text configuration file on the floppy prior to booting. Items such as the dial-up username/password and phone number are placed in this file. A custom chat script and keyboard map can also be added to the floppy. The user does not have to have a Linux system available to use or configure OLAF, but some Linux experience is helpful.