Freesco

FREESCO (stands for FREE ciSCO) is a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 10 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 10 modems.

Here are some key features of "Freesco":

· Ease of use - it's insanely easy to set up
· Thoroughly documented - it's more or less self contained, read one doc and you're off and running
· Like most players in this field, it runs off one floppy
· FREESCO runs in as little as 8 Mb RAM.
· Unique Web Control Panel

FREESCO was developed in the open source tradition as an alternative to routing products offered by Cisco, 3-Com, Accend, Nortel etc. All of these companies offer products that are well made, but they are also proprietary and expensive.

Between the cost of the equipment and support, you'll spend a great deal and only address one or two of your networking needs .. Additionally, by being closed source (proprietary), many of these products restrict the user from modifying the source software to better suit their needs and easily fix problems that arise.

As many of us who work in the IS industry know, Management is always looking for ways to make work more efficient and decrease expenses. At the same time though, the IS department is usually restricted by budgetary constraints that prevent it from implementing products that would do just that, cut costs and make people's work easier and more cost effective.

That is where an open source product like FREESCO can make all the difference. It is open source (non-proprietary), easy to use and best of all, free.

FREESCO is based on the Linux operating system and incorporates many of the features of a full operating system into software that fits on a single 1.44 meg floppy diskette. With FREESCO, you can make:

* a simple bridge with up to 10 Ethernet segments
* a router with up to 10 Ethernet segments
* a dialup line router
* a leased line router
* an Ethernet router
* a dial-in server with up to 10 modems (with multiport modems).
* a time server
* a dhcp server
* a http server
* a ftp server
* a dns server
* a ssh server
* a print server (requires TCP/IP printing client software)

FREESCO also incorporates firewalling and NAT which are resident within the Linux kernel to help protect you and your network. All of these features can be used in conjunction with each other or individually.

Unlike many commercial products, set-up of FREESCO is very simple. FREESCO contains a configuration utility that makes set-up and maintenance of the system easy and fast.

Providing you have the basic information needed to operate the system, i.e., IP address, gateway address, how you want to use the system(s) etc., setup can be completed in less that 10 minutes.

Once the configuration is complete, all it takes is a simple reboot and connection to your network to begin using FREESCO and enjoying what it allows you to do. FREESCO even provides a web control interface so that you can administer the system from any web browser anywhere, anytime.

* Minimum instal requires a 386sx 16 with 8mb of ram. 16+mb of ram is recommended for enabling servers;
* Modes of operation. ethernet, dialup, leased, bridge, RAS, Printer server. Some of these modes can run at the same time as well as switching between dialup and ethernt modes;
* 2.0.39 Linux kernel;
* Support for up to ten networks cards;
* Support for up to five printers;
* Support for up to ten modems, although only four regular modems. Support includes Unix 4 or 8 port modems;
* FREESCO v.0.3.x can run entirely from ram. This requires at least 20+MB;
* FREESCO v0.3.x can run up to 16MB of packages with ramdisks enabled on a floppy install;
* Ident, DHCP, DNS, Print, SSH, FTP, HTTP servers;
* RAS (Remote Access Server) for dialin and nullmodem connections;
* PPPoE, and PPtP clients;
* Dynamic DNS, Zonedit and DHS support;
* Limited support for SCSI hard drives;
* FREESCO v0.3.x can be installed on any FAT 16/32 IDE drive on the primary or secondary controller and the primary or secondary drive;
* can also be installed on an EXT2 partition with the addon ext2 package availible from FREESCOsoft ;
* The v0.3.2+ kernel has a 16k masq table and the icmp leak patch as well as mppe for PPtP users;
* ISA PnP is now included into the floppy in v0.3.2. So network cards and PnP modems can be configured.

What's New in This Release:

Removed /etc/mtab support because this information is duplicated in
/proc/mounts.

Repaired the long delay when shutting down when the send logs is enabled and
there is no email server available. Thanks to Dingetje for creating the new
smtpchk binary and making this possible.

Repaired the firewall so that VPN packages can use encryption. This
specifically relates to the PoPToP package. This repair should also resolve
problems with Internet phone services. If you run the PoPToP package you
should upgrade to poptop-1.1.3i-lightning to be compatible with 0.3.7.

Repaired the long-standing problem of the login timeout when running in setup
mode or during the first time boot procedure. The flying penguin screen saver
is also automatically activated in this mode with two minutes of keyboard
inactivity and "ile" command line history is also loaded.

Repaired the date problem in the "smtpclient" email header.

Repaired the "dyndns" client to update correctly the first fifteen days of the
year rather than every day the first fifteen days.

Repaired a problem with "rmlogs" when dealing with cross yearly logs that
caused all logs to be removed when matching the previous year.

Repaired a long standing bug in the "pkg" command when mis typing a package
name or URL, there would be a random number of different errors without a clear
statement of the problem.

Repaired a bug in the control panel un-ban function that did not allow the use
of spaces and reporting entries as being removed when they did not exist.

Repaired a visual bug in the rmlogs script that allowed it to run a floppy or
ramdisk installs when no logs are present and an error message was produced.

Repaired bug in the control panel that prevented the use of commas when matching
entries for removal in port forwarding.

Repaired a bug in the setup that caused the DNS servers to show as not being
changed when running an Ethernet router with DHCP enabled and not using DHCP
to set the DNS servers.

Changed "busybox" from version 0.26 to 0.60.5 with a lot of changes to the
source code to a revision of 0.60.5f. Thanks to justdave for a number of
repairs and changes to the code. There have also been a lot of changes to
keep backward compatibility and additional source code for enhanced new
features.

Changed the "runchk" script to use the "pidof" binary instead of checking the
/proc directory for running processes so it runs more efficiently.

Changed the "killall" script to use the "pidof" binary instead of checking
the /proc directory for running processes so it runs more efficiently.

Changed the "cp" binary to now support recursive copies with the -R flag.

Changed the initial animated boot logo to provide a much smoother animation
and "lightning" ;-)

Changed all of the saver times into minutes rather than each function being
in a different time format.

Changed "init" to run as control for the login ttys instead of a daemon
agetty shell.

Changed the shutdown process to use a single script ("rc_stop") during
shutdown as well as an extra option when un-mounting the drive so that a
primary ext2 partition can be remounted read-only if it is unable to unmount.

Changed the "touch" binary so it now creates files if they don't exist.

Changed "umount" which repairs a bug when unmounting drives or loop devices
multiple times so that devices are released.

Changed the "klogd" binary so that time zones can be used and kernel logs are
displayed with the correct time zone offset.

Changed the "mv2hd" command so that multiple backups can be created or
restored using different backup names. There is also a test so that previous
backups will not be over written with new backups unless the user wants to
overwrite it.

Changed the "shell" boot mode to now require a user-name and password. "ile"
is also automatically loaded for command line history. This is a less
convenient method but it does add a lot to the system with regards to
security for systems that might be in a compromised environment.

Changed the control panel so services that are disabled in the setup are
shown as being disabled, and their control functions are removed.

Changed the advanced network setup auto configure option to now have a
disable option for the DHCP pool.

Changed "uptime" from a script to a binary so that it now can use the time
zone file and shows uptime accurately with the new time zone feature.

Changed the "ls" command to now sort in alphabetical order as well as some
color enhancements for directories and symlink directories to show the
difference.

Changed "synctime" to now show its output on the command line as well as in
the logs. There is also a test at boot time to restart the firewall after it
has synchronized the correct time if there are any time restrictions in the
restrict.cfg

Changed the control panel so that ALL colors and fonts can be changed in the
style.css file.

Changed "ping" so it now returns an exit code of 1 if the ping fails.

Changed the report.txt format from line feeds to line feeds and carriage
returns so that DOS/Windows machines can view them in the correct format.

Added the "echo" binary so it now supports the -e flag and supports all of
the normal inline commands.

Added the "traceroute" binary to track routing problems.

Added the "cmp" binary to compare text files for differences.

Added the "pidof" binary to efficiently return the pid(s) of running
programs.

Added a telnet client.

Added the ICMP patch to ipfwadm 2.3.0 so that ICMP packets can be masqueraded
and reduced the code size.

Added uptime information such as the number of days the system has been up
and the system load average into the initial control panel startup screen.

Added the flying penguin screen saver so that there is now two built in
screen savers as well as an option to enable any type of third party screen
saver that you have installed.

Added static and custom DNS support into the dynamic DNS client for
dyndns.org users as well as domain-dns and loopia client support.
There is also a special new mode called "unsupported". This means that you can
create your own client command line for the update with unsupported services.
There has also been a rewrite of the dyndns script for a more modular design
which should be simpler to make modifications and add other features. Added a
smtp check so that if the mail server is not available an email of the current
IP is not sent when the option is enabled.

Added the "random" binary.

Added the "gunzip" binary.

Added disabling web control panel add-ons when disabling a package in the
advanced package setup.

Added an option into the firewall so that symmetric masquerading can be done
on internal networks the same as Internet traffic is done. This feature is
actually the way the internal network worked in previous versions of FREESCO
v0.3.4 and less. This option can be enabled by using an "s" flag when
enabling the firewall.

Added time zone capabilities. Included in the modules-037.zip are all of the
available time zone files. All that is required is to copy the correct time
zone file for your region to the floppy in the a:outer mz directory and
FREESCO can automatically adjust for daylight savings time. If disk space is
very limited you optionally can still use the old method of manually setting
the UTC time offset in the setup and manually adjusting it for daylight
savings twice a year.

Added an option to check a URL for patches as well as install them in the
advanced setup package menu. The default is set to www.freesco.org, but there
is an option to change it if necessary.

Added "nslookup" to lookup names and IP addresses.

Added a new directory to the floppy. The directory is a:outercpc and it is
used for making permanent changes to the web control panel. This is primarily
intended for color changes and for adding images as well as other
enhancements or changes to the control panel login page, but it can be used
for much more complex changes to the control panel as well.

Added authentication to the SMTP client so that if a users email server
requires authentication to email the logs, report.txt, or external IP the
client will still work. Thanks to Antoine Megens a.k.a Dingetje for adding
this to the smtpclient.

Added ISP dial-up connection statistics. This separates connection time,
bytes sent, and bytes received for each ISP account on a monthly basis. This
is a control panel item as well as a command line item with "ispstats".

Added RAS user connection statistics. Time, bytes sent, and bytes received
are shown for each RAS user as a monthly total. This is a control panel item
as well as a command line item with "rasstats".

Added the "setleds" binary.

Added turning NumLock on by default at boot time and an option in the advanced
extra settings menu to disable this feature if the behavior is not wanted.

Added a link monitor that turns the keyboard caps lock LED on when an
Internet connection is up on ethernet PPP and dialup routers and off when
the connection is down.

Added an editor option to choose the system editor in the advanced setup. This
option is by default set to /bin/edt, but it can be changed to any other editor
you have installed.

Added an image to the control panel login along with a completely new color
scheme and additional items in the default style.css file.

Added an option to activate and preview screen savers in the primary and
advanced setup when the screen saver is enabled. Added a warning and code to
prevent the screen saver from activating when any keyboard LED application is
active.

Added an SFTP server.

Added an option in the advanced package menu to install the Official ext2
package from the default patch/ext2 URL.

Added a configuration option for internal Oidentd clients that are masqueraded
through the firewall when enabling the Ident server.

Added new event sounds for internal DHCP leases, external PPP connection down,
failed ISP DHCP leases, and firewall logged hits.

Added sound samples to the advanced setup when diagnostic beeps are enabled so
that each sound is played with a text description of the event.

50K free on the floppy disk.