Software firewall/router solution for Telstra Broadband (or any other - geek alert)

**riffer** · 8th February 2007, 07:41

Well, I finally got around to getting broadband at home on Monday.

Telstra 4Mbps up/2Mbps down/ 10GB cap. Speeds are about 3.8Mbps up/1.8Mbps down, so I'm reasonably happy with the speed.

However, one thing I wasn't happy about was the fixed IP address meant the DHCP and NAT services on the Motorola Cable Modem it comes with couldn't be enabled. End result - only one PC on the net at a time. If you want to use any of the others, you had to reset its IP address to the one that will access the net.

Obviously a situation that wasn't going to work. But, being a father of four with hefty child support payments, a birthday last week, and youngest son having his in 2 weeks, the budget just wasn't going to swing to a nice new hardware router.

However, there's that old Compaq Deskpro 4000 in the corner lying unused - 233Mhz, 256MB Ram, a Hard drive, it has an ethernet card in it, and a spare PCI slot and I happen to have a spare ethernet card too.

Enter SmoothWall Express - a very nice little open source firewall/router distro from the Smoothwall Open Source Project. Freeware...

and all it requires is a P150, 64MB Ram, 2GB Hard drive!

Very easy to set up. Download the .iso, write the CD, reboot the PC off the CD. It takes about 10 minutes to do the set up - you can use either a cable modem, ethernet network, phone modem, ISDN or ADSL for your connection. Heck, there's even options for you to configure serial port modems if you must. Set it up - set up incoming and outgoing IP addresses, proxy server (if you must), DHCP server, DNS, etc, and reboot. Takes about 2 minutes to come up.

After that, you set your other PCs to accept DHCP assigned IP adresses and DNS servers, and it works!

By default, the router is set up to work transparently, so you can just keep the "My PC connects directly to the internet" settings and it will automatically connect to any URL.

IP forwarding, VPN all easy to set up - in fact the whole thing is configured via a web interface.

Works a dream, even on a 233mhz, which to be honest, is probably overkill for what I'm running on it.

Thanks to the SmoothWall Open Source Project for a great product.

Recommended to all.

**Dai** · 8th February 2007, 08:19

I was using this program about 5 years ago in the UK.

Had it running on an old brick of a Compaq laptop with a 1st gen Pentium processor

Ran sweet as a nut, never fell over, Loved it.

Dont throw away all those old laptops they can be used for something.

I concur with Riffer.

This is a highly recommended program

**Wasp** · 8th February 2007, 08:54

ipcop is good if you have a box

**WRT** · 8th February 2007, 09:01

Originally Posted by Wasp

ipcop is good if you have a box

Sounds like you are advertising a bladder control product for women.

Riffer - cheers for the write up.

**Wasp** · 8th February 2007, 09:04

lol, http://www.ipcop.org/

A secure Linux distribution managed through a web-interface. It turns an old PC into a firewall and VPN gateway.

**bungbung** · 8th February 2007, 09:35

I'm using a similar thing called clarkconnect,

* Internet Gateway
* Firewall
* VPN
* E-mail
* Bandwidth and P2P Manager
* Multiwan
* Intrusion Prevention
* Web and FTP Servers
* Antispam/Antivirus
* Content Filtering
* File and Print Services
* Data backup
* Groupware

www.clarkconnect.com

**jrandom** · 8th February 2007, 09:51

Yes, I've been recommending SmoothWall to people in your situation for a while. Great product. I'd use it myself if my Netgear router didn't already do everything required, or if I had flatmates and wanted to log bandwidth use, etc.

**TerminalAddict** · 8th February 2007, 10:01

I use pfsense (which is a m0n0wall fork) running on a 128mb CF Disk-On-Module
bought myself a cute little via EPIA 10000 board, chucked in 128mb of ram, and a dlink 4 port NIC

the result is with one box you can manage 1 LAN, 1 DMZ, 2 ISP connections, and still have the on board lan available "just in case"

frustration happen when I can do things in IPTABLES, but can't do things in PF firewall (that's the software used in *BSD) which all of these stripped down OSes are based on

EDIT:
Just noticed the post about clark connect
this is not based on BSD

EDIT 2:
Crikey .. I might be wrong ... smoothwall is based on linux, therfore either IPTABLES (2.6 kernel) or IPCHAINS (2.4 kernel)

**xwhatsit** · 8th February 2007, 14:59

Originally Posted by TerminalAddict

I use pfsense (which is a m0n0wall fork) running on a 128mb CF Disk-On-Module
bought myself a cute little via EPIA 10000 board, chucked in 128mb of ram, and a dlink 4 port NIC

the result is with one box you can manage 1 LAN, 1 DMZ, 2 ISP connections, and still have the on board lan available "just in case"

frustration happen when I can do things in IPTABLES, but can't do things in PF firewall (that's the software used in *BSD) which all of these stripped down OSes are based on

EDIT:
Just noticed the post about clark connect
this is not based on BSD

EDIT 2:
Crikey .. I might be wrong ... smoothwall is based on linux, therfore either IPTABLES (2.6 kernel) or IPCHAINS (2.4 kernel)

It says in the changelog for v2.0, that it's running a 2.4 kernel and iptables. ipchains(8) is from the days of 2.2.

I would roll my own, but that's just me

. My router's running linux anyway -- D-Link piece of shit, G604T. I would replace it with my old P75 running a 2.6 kernel, but I hardly ever use ethernet, just wireless these days.

**Lias** · 8th February 2007, 15:00

Used to use Freesco for much the same thing.. Runs on a floppy (or a crappy lil 20mb hard drive or whatever)

http://www.freesco.org/

**pete376403** · 8th February 2007, 15:08

Also consider sme-server, which is based on red hat. SME has a lot more functionality that the others (ie it is a full small medium enterprise server) but a whole heap of fun to play with. Machine spec requires a bit more that the other distros, but works for me on a P-II, 192 meg PC with 2 HDDs (includes software raid 1)
http://www.smeserver.org/