Re: (clug-talk) SmoothWall help

[Jeffrey Clement]

I had used IPCOP for a bit and it worked pretty well. I had one problem where it recommended I install a hotfix, I did, and the system wouldn't boot anymore. Aside from that it was pretty solid and had a reasonable admin interface. I think I'm still pretty sold on the single floppy firewalls like:
http://www.bbiagent.net
Since they are we less work and the admin interface is really slick.

Jeff

Kevin Anderson wrote:

The fork is called IPcop.

I haven't done much more than see either, but it might help. Smoothwall GPL
seemed old, the last time I checked. Not that that is a bad thing, but it
made me worry that they weren't really supporting it anymore.

Kev.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jarrod Major" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 10:40 AM
Subject: Re: (clug-talk) SmoothWall help

Hey Doug, Jason, Kevin and Graham,

I am using SmoothWall GPL 0.9.9 SE and I have the patches for it as well.
Yes I believe it has been forked but this is the most recent stable GPL
version. There is a beta but I wanted to stay away from that for now.

Kevin I believe the Fork is one they are charging for so I don't think

that

will do. If you find something that is still GPL let me know.

Yes, we had tried setting SmoothWall up with only one NIC in at a time to
see if we could isolate it. This also did not work.

Thanks for the link Doug, I may try LRP but I wanted something robust

enough

to handle some tricky stuff. The P90 and P166 only have about 32Mb RAM so
I'm not sure if they would be able to run LRP. The P233 has 64MB and

appears

to be a more likely candidate. I may check this out.

Good questions and suggestions guys.

BTW, Graham, I too have heard that RealTek's can be flaky but I have used
them in all my computers and they seem to work fine. If you want to check
your DLink card to find out whether it is a RealTek card it should be

fairly

obvious, the chip should have rtl followed by either 8129 or 8139 on it

for

the 10BaseT or 10/100BaseT respectively. I know that some cards by a
particular manufacturer spontaneously change chipmakers during the course

of

a NIC card's lifespan. It starts out as a RealTek then they get something
else. So when you think you using a card that has good Linux support for a
particular chipset and the manufacturer changes you are hooped. I always
check my hardware. The better support sites not only list the hardware but
even go so far as to list chipsets to offset this issue.

Jarrod

----- Original Message -----
From: "Graham Monk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 10:19 AM
Subject: Re: (clug-talk) SmoothWall help

Jarrod Major wrote:

I decided to try my hand at making a home firewall/gateway. SmoothWall
seemed to be the distro of choice. I had two computers that were likely
candidates for the job an IBM Aptiva P166 and a Packard Bell P90. Both

still

very serviceable. I also have a small collection of Linux-proven NIC's

that

I thought would work just fine in this application.

After several attempts on these two boxes, I ended up picking up a Dell
Pentium 233. This computer also seems to not want to take to installing
SmoothWall. I have checked the SmoothWall site for hardware

compatibility

and the NIC's for the most part appear to be supported. Here's a list

of

what I have and the Linux driver module typically used:

PCI
RealTek 8139 10/100 - rtl8139
RealTek 8129 10 BaseT - ne2k-pc / ne2k / ne
SMC EtherPower - tulip

ISA
Intel EtherExpress 16 - eexpress
3Com ?? - ??

All three computers will get to the Green NIC probe phase and fail. The
probe will not autodetect the cards. I have gone into manual mode and

given

it the appropriate module, IO and IRQ. All to no avail. These cards

have

all

worked under Windows not very long ago and some have even run perfectly

fine

under other distributions of Linux. I am very careful with my hardware

so

I

cannot believe that they could all be bad.

The ISO I used for burning my SmoothWall disc was checked against the

MD5

Checksum and it was verified.

I cannot believe that three computers would all refuse to take this

install

with various NIC's in place. I enlisted Marcel's help and he could not
overcome my install issues either. We're both stymied.

Anyone have any experience they'd like to share or any advice? Thanks

in

advance.

As an aside, we even attempted to throw OpenBSD on one of the boxes and

it

crapped out almost immediately. We were pretty tired at this point so

we

did

not delve too deeply into this install. It was a floppy/FTP install.

Jarrod Major
CLUG Treasurer
Registered Linux User: #224211

Hi Jarrod
I fear I may make myself look stupid here but anyway,
I had problems with smoothwall myself using Dlink cards
which are supposed to use realtek chips but do something weird
with them. I found that startec S100 works well.
Suggestion,.... Try installing with only one card ( first one then the
other)
This should at least isolate which card is causing problems, assuming
this is not something you have allready tried.
Graham