[ale] Devil of a time with Devil-Linux

[Stephen Cristol]

On Feb 25, 2006, at 12:01 PM, Joe Knapka wrote:
> Stephen Cristol wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> Anyone have experience with Devil-Linux?
>
> I use it for my firewall, on a 5-year-old Emachines box.  I do recall
> that at some point
> early on I had a similar problem, but I don't remember the cause.  It
> may have been
> a badly-burned CD?  The "wrong media" messages seem relevant.   
> Also,   I
> seem to
> recall that I had to hook the CD-ROM drive up to the primary IDE  
> bus for
> things to
> work properly. But I'm just guessing, since it's probably been three
> years since I set
> up my Devil box originally.

Thanks for the tips. Since I started this quest, they have released D- 
L 1.2.9, so I made a fresh CD and tried again with the same result.  
I'm inclined to think that is not my problem.

The boot setup for this box shows that the internal hard drive is the  
"Primary Master" and the CD-ROM is the "Secondary Master". Would I  
want to make the CD-ROM the "Primary Slave" or swap the two masters?  
Is that as simple as moving the power and ATA cables followed by  
updating the location of things in the boot setup?

> I tried some other CD firewalls, such as Smoothwall, but what I like
> about Devil
> is that it doesn't try to over-automate things. Smoothwall IIRC has
> maybe three
> pre-packaged configurations, like "Dialup", "Broadband", "Broadband  
> with
> DMZ"
> or something like that; but if you want something different, it's
> painful to customize.
> Devil is very Slackware-like, and if you change anything in /etc,  
> it happily
> saves your changes to the configuration medium without making you jump
> through
> any hoops or forcing you to defeat a "helpful" configuration- 
> management
> system.

This is much of the appeal for me. I don't want to deal with custom  
GUI configuration programs. I prefer having configuration files where  
I can document what I am thinking when I make changes.

I recently discovered another CLI based firewall distribution  
(sentryfirewall.com) that might be worth a look if I can't make  
progress with D-L.

Thanks,
S