Requesting Ideas for the Ideal HW & SW for Hacker Box (on a budget)!

[furrie]

Hia everybody!

Nice Forum... It's right up my street!

I'm saving my hard earned cash so I can make/build my own, decent Hacker Box.

I would love to hear your opinions on the best HardWare & SoftWare specifications that I should be looking for... Best as in VALUE FOR MONEY!

Components I ALREADY HAVE...

Midi Tower ATX Case & PSU
Matrox Millenium II 4Mb PCI Graphics Card
32Mb PC100 DIMM (but may get more, depending on your reactions)
Princeton Graphics Systems EO505 15" Monitor (SEE NOTE BELOW...)
My shared, (with my NEARLY wife) Win '98 SE PC, I can't muck about with this too much!!!

Obviously I have plenty to get... Please bear in mind that I'm shopping at a computer fayre (or wherever is cheapest...) as I am no millionaire!!!

I'm not afraid of overclocking the CPU and/or VGA... I plan to do whatever it takes to cobble together a Kool System at THE Lowest Price. So I could do with ideas on specific motherboards & CPUs, (favourites in the overclocking world)... I'm not into Liquid Nitrogen but I could go for large fans if required!!!

Hard disk/CD sub-systems...
Modem(s)
NICs (I need some method of linking the two PCs together and sharing a single Dial-Up phone connection (at the same time!!!).

If I network this 'new' box with my home PC (so I can play...) should I be able to connect to the 'net using my home PCs internal modem or should I put the modem in the new box and when I use my home PC to go online, connect through my new boxs modem???

How many questions in one sentence?!?

It's been suggested that I get an "external" modem & not an internal one for the hacking box...WHY?


Software...O/S

Ages ago I bought RHLinux 5.1 on CD, if I install that would I be able to download the newer bits of 6.2 and upgrade... Or would it be best to download the whole 6.2 version & clean install?

*bsd O/S...Is that as easy for the "newbie" (me as if you hadn't guessed!) as RH and which is best (is this question as contentious or ambiguous as I think it may be?)?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated...

MY GOD, DON'T I GO ON!!!

Sorry,

Cheers, furrie ;-)

[thekingofpain]

Start reading, get familiar with the "search" feature, there are about a bazillion good posts here, the more ya get into em the more ya learn... http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[daveleau]

More RAM (64 at least! but 128 recommended)
Netgear or DLink NIC (3COM the best but expensive)
3Com ISA modem
IBM or Western Dig IDE hard drives (stay away from Maxtor if overclocking)
Celeron 566 and Abit BF6 (what I use and I love it...setup will cost around $225 and it will do at least 850 MHz. Mine does 918)

You can use internet sharing as your internet connection. You would risk getting your wife mad if you get booted from your ISP for hacking (your title).

I have only used RH 5.2 and have not used any other flavors.

Good luck. THese are my general recommendations. I agree with the post above that you should search and read why each is best. You should find lots of recent and very useful stuff. I am by no means an expert (and have never hacked) so these may be changed a bit but for general purposes these are nice peripherals. Haven't heard any reason as to why an external modem would be better. I used to subscribe to that notion until my internal 3COM ISA blew away my 2 external modems (3COM and Zoom).

Good luck
Dave

BTW- www.Pricewatch.com (http://www.Pricewatch.com) is a great place to start to find the cheapest prices on peripherals. Be sure to cross reference the seller at www.resellerratings.com (http://www.resellerratings.com) Also try to find a single vendor for all stuff as it will save on shipping...

[This message has been edited by daveleau (edited 06-28-2000).]