Hey All,

I figured that I should post something about my foray into firewalling. So
far everything seems to be on the up and up. I have to say that when things
work they work very well. The install was a breeze and configuring it seems
to be fairly simple.

I have it set up as a Red & Green firewall. I may add the Orange later. For
those of you that don't know what the hell I am talking about. SmoothWall
and IPCop have a setup where the NIC that connects to the Internet is called
Red and the NIC that attaches to your internal network (behind the firewall)
is green. Orange is a DMZ.

You are given lots of choices with regards to the type of setup you have. I
am on aDSL so I was able to set it up that way. It supports dial-up and even
DSL through USB if you have that particular kind of setup.

Setting up the NIC's is a no-brainer as long as you stick to PCI, the ISA's
are more tricky (understandably). I got caught on the passwords. It gets you
to set three: one for root, one for setup and one for (web) admin. The web
admin one should be alphanumeric ONLY. I had stuck an odd character that was
not recognized. So this meant having to log into the box as root and
updating the users file with an appropriate password. Not an overly
difficult procedure but I had to search a bit for the user file.

I decided I wanted to add the list of adservers to the hosts file and this
proved to be a bit of a pain. I finally got them in when I SSH'd into the
firewall invoked vi and copied the entries from a local text file to the
firewall's hosts file. There was a bit of lag but I'm not sure if it is
because my firewall has a small amount of RAM or because both boxes are
P166's. I need to figure out SCP next...

I have a ways to go but it seems to be working just fine. The end
configuration is:

IBM Aptiva P166
32 Mb RAM (would like to up this but SIMM's can be expensive)
1 Gb HD
1 RealTek 8139 10/100BaseT NIC
1 SMC Ethernet 10BaseT NIC

I can print out the resources and usage stats again if you guys are curious.

Thanks for the help guys!

Jarrod Major
CLUG Treasurer
Registered Linux User: #224211

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