On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 08:24:20PM +0100, john gennard wrote: > I have a small home LAN and decided to protect it with a firewall. > Some time ago I built a small box with spare items and installed > Smoothwall on it with two NICs (one on the Green channel and the > other on the Red channel with a modem to connect to my ISP). > > Although I can access the Smoothwall box from browsers on either > of my other boxes, I can't configure it (not even the ppp connection). > I asked Smoothwall's list for assistance but got no reply from anyone > using Debian and can find no help searching the net. What do you mean you can't configure it? You can't SSH into the Smoothwall box, or when you do the changes don't stick or... Also, I keep hearing stories about the Smoothwall developers refusing to help people who don't pay them...IPCop (http://www.ipcop.net/) is a fork of Smoothwall with the express intent to be nicer to people:) > I'm now wondering if it might be better to get rid of Smoothwall and > put a minimal installation of Debian on the firewall box. Does anyone > have any advice, please? This is extremely easy to do. Just do a basic install on the box, then add the ipmasq package. It'll handle most everything by default. > There are a number of 'annoying' things with Smoothwall despite > a lot of write ups. A ppp profile was partly configured in the setup > and my moden was identified as being on 'COM1'. No changes can be > made to a profile 'while RED is active' and I can't find how to > deactivate the channel without going well back into the install > program. The firewall log talks of 'UDP Protocol', 'source > 192.168.0.1' ( I use 192.168.1.x ), 'Netbios ports 137 and 138' > and lots more which I have certainly not provided info for. > This 0.9.9 Linux version seems more inclined to Windows - it > certainly gives much more info on configuring for that. I've never used Smoothwall in my life, so I've got no advice for you here. If you switch to Debian, however, you'll have the help of all the nice people on this list to back you up. > Any suggestions what I should consider doing? Whichever way > I proceed, I shall need help in configuring my boxes to 'go through > the firewall' to get email, download data and browse etc. Another nice thing about using Debian for your firewall is that it can handle other things for you. If it has the horsepower, you can run Squid (a HTTP caching proxy) to speed up browsing, a mail server to forward your mail around, and store it so you can read it via IMAP or POP3 from work (or wherever), a DNS server to cache remote lookups and to let you centralise your machine naming, etc, etc, etc. -rob
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