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My smoothwall story so far...
In my quest to find the best way to share my internet connection seamlessly
I bumped on this piece of software. Smoothwall (a.k.a. smoothie) is a
trimmed down version of linux, specially designed to behave as a firewall.
It is really good in what it is doing. It only needs a dedicated low-spec
machine.
Having a dedicated machine as a router/firewall was brilliant for
me, because my main PC is a dual-boot windows/Linux machine, which complicates
things when you want to share a connection based on it...
My firewall hardware setup is as follows:
- 166MHz
AMD processor
- 16 Mb
RAM
- An old
motherboard (AT but with built-in USB controller - required by the Alcatel
modem)
- NE2000
Network card (a cheap one - with Realtek chipset)
- A hard
drive
- Case with
power supply (and wheels... don't ask why...)
I downloaded
the ISO image of smoothwall 0.9.9 SE from the website
http://www.smoothwall.org and I burnt a CD. I attached a CD-ROM
on the PC just for the installation (it was removed afterwards). For some
reason the CD wouldn't boot directly, so I had to attach a floppy as well
and boot from there. The installation process is a breeze, and after the
setup is complete you only need 5 more minutes to setup the ADSL. I found
one website writen by Duncan Jauncey on setting up smoothwall for BT-Openworld
broadband (
link). It has all the information you need to set up BT+USB Alcatel+Smoothie
in a few minutes.
Managing smoothwall is very easy as well. As soon as the PC is set
up, you don't need a monitor,keyboard or mouse attached to it. It has a
very well-made web-based control panel that you can access it from any
computer of your network (not from the internet obviously - for security
reasons).
Smoothie is
very versatile and beats any ADSL-modem+Router commercial products. It allows
you to automatically set up a no-ip.com or similar name, so your machine
can have a webname even though your IP address change. With the addition
of a second network card you can have a demilitarized zone, so you can run
web-servers mail-servers or whatever you want! You can use it as a web
proxy server and a DHCP server (should you need one). Their website is
frequently updated with various patches that fix any security holes found.
The update process is really easy as well (as easy as sending an email with
an attachment in hotmail). They claim that smoothwall has never been hacked...
And the big advantage: IT'S FREE!!!
Personaly, I would recommend it to any ADSL user in UK that uses the
Alcatel modem. Three pieces of advice:
- Try to
get 64Mb RAM (I'm going to upgreade that soon - as the new patches update
the kernel, and the new one needs more RAM)
- Have a
printout of Duncan's webpage (for that BT ADSL setup)
- Do not
enable the web proxy server... I had a few problems with that feature.
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