[Hampshire] Firewall distributions

I've been running firewall distributions for a good few years now on an
old Compaq low profile box (Pentium III, 500 MHz) which I bought from
Jamie's. I started with Smoothwall v2.0, and added extra RAM when I
upgraded to Smoothwall v3.0; it now has 512MB RAM and a 6.3GB HDD.

About a year ago, an article in Linux Format caught my eye, and I
decided to give IPCop a go - we have a fair few visitors over the year,
and it's handy to be able to give them internet access via a wireless
access point without having to let them loose to roam on my home
network. IPCop's blue interface looked like the answer, but I've had no
end of grief trying to get the WLANAP add-on for IPCop to work. I've
tried a total of five different wireless LAN cards; IPCop v1.9.20
recognises only one of them (it uses the RaLink 2561 chipset), and even
with that one, when I installed the appropriate version of the add-on it
threw a wobbly at the end of the installation.

To add to the fun, the WLANAP add-on doesn't work any more since the
upgrade from 1.9.19 to 1.9.20 - the upgrade included a new kernel
version, 2.6.32-4, and the latest version of wlanap-ipcop (3.0.0-c6)
matches kernel version 2.6.32-3...

Can anyone suggest an alternative route to where I want to be (i.e. the
equivalent of IPCop with red, green and blue interfaces), please? I
suppose in the end I could just stick a wired network card in the IPCop
box and hook up to an external wireless access point, but that would
mean using another power socket, and I already use about 18 in this room...

Thanks in advance for any help

Ian
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Ian Park
17 Pyle Hill
Newbury
Berkshire
RG14 7JJ
Tel: +44 (0)1635 821420
email: i.d.c.park@???
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