Firewall/router/Torrent client

[skattrd]

Newbie warning: I know virtually nothing about linux.

I've been running an ipcop box as a router/firewall for a few weeks now and would like to run a torrent client on it. I don't think this is possible for ipcop (please correct me if I'm wrong) so I'm thinking about installing a linux distro.

Whats the easiest/simplist solution for a newbie?
Functions I'm looking for are:
Firewall
Router (2 NiC's + modem atm, possibly adding a wireless nic later)
Compatible with Bewan ST pci adsl modem
DHCP/DNS Server
Torrent client
Remote admin - managable from win7 pc

The pc I'm using is an old p3 box with 40GB hdd 256MB RAM, I can increase to 512MB but no more. Would this be suitable for what I'm wanting?

Thx
Chris

 

[Illusion]

Any linux distro should be fine for everything you have listed (assuming there are drivers for the ADSL modem). I'd recommend Ubuntu desktop edition if you are new to this as you probably won't want to be doing everything by command line...

Something to bear in mind is that this way you will need to set up all the services manually, whilst this is fairly straight forward with a bit of experience it will be much more complicated than just installing IP Cop and changing things through a web interface. I have never used IP Cop or any other firewall / router type distro's so I'm unsure whether they have the ability to run 'normal' programs however I would expect at least some of them to (OpenWRT on my WRT54G can and that is a tiny custom version of linux, obviously this is without a GUI though).

If you want to learn about linux then I'd say go for the Ubuntu option and jump in head first, you will learn lots in no time. If you want something simple and easy to manage then have a look around for another router orientated distro that has the ability to work as a normal OS also.

If you go for Ubuntu the next question would be how do you want to manage the torrents. One of the things I love about linux is that you can use shell scripts to automate things for you, I use Deluge as my client but I rarely have to actually point and click on anything, it is set up to automatically download torrents which it finds in a certain folder, and is launched / killed from a shell script at specific times to avoid upsetting Virgin Media by downloading in peak periods. You could do something like this or look for a command line based client and manage downloads over SSH etc...

If you need any more advice then just report back to the thread...

Cheers

 

[skattrd]

Cheers Illusion, I've got a copy of Ubuntu somewhere. I suppose the first thing is to install it and see if I an get the modem to work. I've done a bit of digging around on the net and it appears that the drivers for my adsl modem were written in SUSE, so that will prob be my fall-back if I can't get the modem to work in Ubuntu.