Gentoo FirewallOnCD

[Koon]

Since Gentoo is a meta-distribution, I thought about using it to build an iptables-firewall working straight from a CD (Isolinux ramdisk), like the way Sentry works.

There are several problems raised by using Gentoo for such an application, but with your help I may succeed

1- A Gentoo install without gcc
A firewall should not contain a compiler. Is it possible to build a barebones Gentoo system without gcc ? The problem is to get "emerge --usepkg" to work without gcc installed, because from there it's simple to build elsewhere using "ebuild package" and deploy the tbz2 packages. If you have any idea on how to proceed...

2- Configuration files
To have writeable configuration files, I thought of using the Sentry way, mount the floppy at init and copy a few files (iptables rules, maybe network conf) before running the firewall scripts. Does anyone see a glitch ?

3- Gentoo running from isolinux
Is there any issues involved in running Gentoo from isolinux (large initrd's...) ?

Thanks for your feedback here, if anyone already did this I would like to know about it, and if I go straight into the wall with this project I'd better know before I start !

- K