Which is the best linux version for firewall?

Prefebly with a gui....

They all firewall equally well, the question is whether they might bring along too much excess baggage. I don't know if any of them have a gui for managing the firewall, except for firewall-specific ones like Smoothwall.

If you don't need a local gui to manage the firewall, any sort of gui at all is sort of pointless.

well, i just ment for linux to have a gui. The actuall fire wall i don't care about. I was thinking of use Redhat 9.0

Yea sure, that'd be fine.

Mandrake 9.0 is also pretty nice.

If you want a firewall OS, definately try smoothwall, very small DL.

The benefit of running a firewall specific box is that there are no other services running that could be broken into.

A spare P200 with 128 MB of RAM is great for firewall and routing. If you don't plan on doing a lot of translation you could probably do with less RAM. As usual more is better.

Smoothwall, is nice because it is a very secure platform with several nice features packaged. VPN, Web-Proxy, SSH maintenance, easily readable logs, IP forwarding, etc.

For doubling up on security you could (should) run a firewall on your boxen behind the primary firewall. You can never be too paranoid about security.

Check www.smoothwall.org they have a dedicated distro for a pre configured firelwall with NAT and IPtables for packet filtering.

Or try Mandrake MNF (Multi Network Firewall) at http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/ftp.php3#security for a list of mirror sites.

ahhh, thanks guys. thats what i was looking for. Im installing it on an old 300 mhz machine right now. Ill use the other 500 mhz machine for redhat 9.0 and give the mail server a try. Thanks again.