This is a project I did out of need. I had an old Pentium 90-based computer, a modem, an ISP account and some spare time. What I needed was internet access without the hassle.

The Hairless Dialup Gateway is a one-floppy distribution that once booted will detect a modem and network card (most Ethernet cards supported by the Linux kernel should work), dials up your ISP and attempts to keep that connection up for as long as the computer is running. It will do IP masquerading for the entire LAN connected to it through its Ethernet adapter. In addition to this, it sports a caching nameserver and a DHCP server which makes life efficient and effortless. You can also telnet into the gateway to get simple statistics (continuously updated) on the connection. It does not require a hard disk - actually it doesn't support IDE or SCSI interfaces at all.

The gateway is configured through a few settings in a text file called router.cfg on the floppy disk. It is straight-forward and self-explanatory. The disk filesystem is FAT, so you can edit this file from popular operating systems, including Linux and Windows.

The Hairless Dialup Gateway is designed to automate as many tasks as possible. It uses wvdial for modem detection, configuration and dialling. This means you won't have to enter init strings or write chat scripts.

Note: It does not work with so-called "Winmodems". If in doubt, get an external modem that connects to the serial port of your computer.

• No winmodem support.
• No PCMCIA support, making it useless in most laptops.
• Statistics could be more verbose.
• It would be nice to optionally support Squid caching, if you have a hard disk.

Get a blank floppy disk that can hold 1.44M of data. Any working high-density floppy disk should do, no special formatting required. Use cat or dd to write the image to the disk (under Windows, there's a utility called rawrite available). Edit router.cfg on the floppy, using the editor of your choice, and set the phone number to dial, the account name and a password, at a minimum. Insert the disk and boot. That's it.

If you're using cat, do like this:

cat imagefile > /dev/fd0

Modify imagefile to the name of the release you downloaded, and /dev/fd0 to the device node for your floppy drive.

1.0.0 (2001.09.13) hairless-1440-1.0.0.img