I'm building a router out of a Mini-ITX pc + compact flash card setup and I'm trying to choose a suitable distro. My criteria are:
- Must be able to run from a CF card (so no excessive disk writes)
- I'm mostly interested in having a high powered router for the purpose of traffic shaping
- That said, I'm also interested in using this to learn more about how routing / networking works (my original plan was to use a basic bare-bones distro like LFS and put the routing software on top myself) so I'm not after a distro that hides the inner workings from me
- I'd also like to have SSH
I think I've narrowed it down to two - Monowall and pfSense (pfSense being a fork of Monowall)
Monowall has the advantage of being targetted towards flash cards, wheras pfSense has more of the traffic shaping and other features I'm interested in.
I also understand that they use different mechanisms unerneath the covers, but I cant say I understand that much about the differences to make an informed decision.
Does anyone have any advice / information on either of those (or another alternative I havent yet considered)