It requires a PC-standard computer with a 1.44MB diskette drive, and two supported network cards (or one network card and a modem, for dial-up use). Most of the popular ISA and PCI network cards are supported. No hard drive is used. A 486DX CPU (any speed) and 12MB or more RAM are recommended. For PPPoE or an especially fast internet connection (i.e. several Mbps), a 66MHz or faster CPU is recommended. If you plan to use any add-ons, at least 16MB of RAM is recommended. Anything more than a Pentium I and 64MB RAM is probably wasted. A working Windows (95 or later) or full-distro Linux system is needed to create the initial boot diskette, and can be handy for later modifications, but is not needed for CL operation.

A bare-bones system can be built with just a traditional motherboard (no integrated peripherals), small power supply, video card (any kind), and the aforementioned two NICS and diskette drive (and controller if not on the motherboard). A case comes in very handy. A keyboard and monitor are recommended during configuration and testing, but are optional for production use; the video card needs to stay installed, and you should configure the system BIOS not to halt on keyboard errors if you won't be leaving the keyboard attached. Serial/parallel/USB ports, hard drive controllers, etc. are all superfluous. A 386SX CPU and 8MB RAM is the bare minimum for a Coyote Linux system to boot and operate indefinitely without crashing. A 16MHz CPU should be able to keep up with the traffic demands of a typical <1Mbps internet connection. 8MB of RAM will not allow the use of any add-ons, and in fact it would be a good idea to delete (or rename) the webadmin.tgz pacakge from the boot diskette, to save RAM for the core functions of the system. NOTE: The Windows disk builder does not include the necessary software components to create a diskette that will work on a 386 or 486SX platform (i.e. no math coprocessor); you must use the Linux scripts to build a boot diskette with FPU emulation.

Although Coyote is a Linux-based system, an internet connection shared by a Coyote firewall can be used by nearly any modern operating system that uses TCP/IP networking. It is known to work with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003, MacOS 7/8/9, OS X, Linuxes, BSDs, commercial Unixes, Netware 5/6, OS/400, BeOS, plus many others.

Coyote Linux works with most cable modems, DSL connections, T1 and other leased lines, and other technologies that provide a standard ethernet connection. (It does not work with internal interface cards or USB-connected interfaces.) It supports statically-assigned IP addresses, DHCP, and PPPoE. PPP Dialup modems are also supported, but may require some tweaking on the destination system.

Because Coyote is installed by building a new boot diskette from scratch, there is no direct way to upgrade a CL1 boot disk to CL2. If you are using an unmodified installation of CL1, you should be able to build a new CL2 diskette (keep the old one, just in case) and switch to that without difficulty. If you have set up port-forwarding using ipchains or ipmasqadm commands, or other such modifications, you will have to recreate those changes using the new Coyote rule system for portforwards.

To upgrade an earlier release of CL2 to the current release, you can build a new CL2 diskette, and copy the files from the /config directory on your old disk to the new one; this will transfer all of your basic settings. Any add-on packages you've installed will have to be added to the new disk, of course.

Many people have suggested that all sorts of features should be added to Coyote Linux (web server, ftp server, etc) claiming that they don't know how to use Linux and that Coyote Linux was so easy to set up. I don't support this view because Coyote Linux does what was intended to do - share an Internet connection. If you want a print server, web server, samba, ftp, or whatever, there are already distributions out there that provide these functions. If all of the feaures that people ask for were added to Coyote, setup of Coyote would be just like to any other distribution. If you want to use Linux for functions that Coyote does not support, you really should learn how to use a distribution that already has said feature and/or learn how to add it yourself. I will never add a print server, web server, etc to the base Coyote Linux distribution as it has absolutely nothing to do with sharing an Internet connection.

While no Internet-connected machine is 100% safe, Coyote provides a moderate-to-strong degree of security for the computers that it shares an Internet connection with. Coyote Linux and other distributions like it that do not run services such as web, ftp, email, etc are as secure - or possibly more so - than commercially-offered home firewall/gateway solutions. By using Network Address Translation (NAT) to hide the true addresses of the internal computers (LAN hosts), by "stealthing" ports to partially hide the presence of your LAN from port-scanners, and by preventing any sort of direct connection from an Internet host to your LAN, Coyote provides the necessary security to enable such inherently-insecure services as Microsoft file/print sharing or Microsoft IIS with SQL Server, on your LAN. However, please note that by adding any portforwarding rules to Coyote, you are opening your LAN to additional risks. When a Coyote Rule allows access to an Internal computer, you then have to make sure that the service that is being exposed to the Internet is secure.

Try the user forums. They are linked to from the main menu and contain over three years worth of questions and answers from thousands of Coyote Linux users. There are also additional sites that contain information about the use of Coyote Linux. A more complete FAQ for Coyote Linux is available at http://rzero.com/coyote/faq.html and an additional admin guide is available at the www.routerdesign.com site .

If the netmods.txt file is in the same directory as the executable, you did not unpack the archive correctly. You should use a windows version of a zip utility (not the old DOS pkzip) as the archive contains long filenames. You also need to make sure that you extract the directory structure contained in the zip file. The netmods.txt file should reside in a "data" subdirectory. Don't forget to specify "Use folder names" in Winzip!

No, Coyote Linux does not include IDE nor SCSI drivers. Coyote Linux was designed for floppy use.

No. Coyote Linux does not contain USB support. In addition, Linux uses SCSI emulation for USB storage devices, which would dramatically increase the size of the kernel.

No. Coyote Linux does not contain PCMCIA support due to the size of this option. The addition of the kernel and userland PCMCIA services requires roughly 150k of additional floppy space.

Yes. Current versions of Coyote Linux 2.x have built in QoS support for bandwidth limiting and fair-queue policies.

The web administrator listens on port 8180. To access it, you need to use a url like: http://192.168.0.1:8180. If you changed the default LAN address of your Coyote firewall, substitute that address for the 192.168.0.1.

Note: If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you MUST specify the "http://" before the address.