Lintrack

I need to retract my previous statements about a tutorial that I called faulty. This tutorial, "Lintrack As A LAN Gateway and An OpenVPN Bridge" is correct and will result in a working router. I was having problems getting a client machine to connect to the Internet and it was due to a problem with the software on the system, not a mistake the author made. All I had to do to get it working properly was update the package list and upgrade the software.

So, I now have a working PC-based router running Lintrack and a client computer can connect to the Internet.

It's important to note that the intention is to only boot off of the compact flash card (read-only, except for software changes and upgrades) and run the router in RAM, or system memory. Flash memory in general has a finite number of write cycles before they wear out, which is why they are not hard disk replacements.

The reason is that when a system runs out of, or low on, memory, it uses the hard disk as a cache to store and retrieve (swap) information that isn't immediately needed, which is called a swap partition. When you consider that a lot of read and write cycles take place with a swap partition, you can understand how quickly a flash disk would wear out. Yes, a flash disk would work, but would fail sooner than a conventional hard disk drive if it used a swap partition. Flash-based routers and computers simply write an image of the flash disk (that contains all the software and settings) into RAM (memory) and run off of the image.