New Firewall Up and Running with Smoothwall

My Linksys wireless router has gradually been causing more and more problems with my internet connection. Nearly every day it just craps out and won't make outbound connections. If I just power cycle it, it comes right back.

Because the Linksys isn't the only wireless router laying around and I've got 2 static IP addresses from Speakeasy, I've had a Netgear router on the other IP address. It provides a fallback for internet access. However, the printers, file servers, etc. aren't on that network, so it's always been just a temporary patch.

Rather that buy yet another wireless router, I decided to dig in the parts pile for an old machine and put together a more robust Linux firewall and use one of the existing routers as a wireless access point.

I'll admit there were other reasons motivating this as well. With our move toward hosting a foreign exchange students (and hopes to continue in future years), the ability to have a transparent logging proxy (even if it's off by default) is a useful tool. Also, while I use SSH forwarding heavily, I like the idea of having a real VPN setup as well.

Regardless, I had a 700Mhz Celeron with 128MB of RAM and a 20GB drive, which seemed a pretty good candidate. So, I picked up a new network card to add to the one that was already in it and burned a copy of the Smoothwall 2.0. I hooked the machine up to my KVM switch and ran through the install.

The first glitch (no such thing as a 100% smooth install of anything open source or commercial) came when the new network card wasn't recognized.

I spent about an hour looking for the best way to get it automatically recognized (somehow the machine wouldn't read the CD that came with the card, containing a Linux driver). After that, I just decided to give the Smoothwall 3.0 Alpha a shot to see if the driver was included there.

What do you know, it picked it up just fine. The rest of the install was quick. From there, I hooked the Netgear wireless up to the GREEN side of the Smoothwall box (the LAN side), shut the DHCP off, changed the IP address to 192.168.0.99 and rebooted everything involved. So far, everything works like a charm. The documentation covered all of the questions I had.

Now, I've just got to set up the port forwarding rules and static routing to match a decent structure. The DHCP is set for the 100+ portion of the IP range and I'm thinking I'd like to segment it so all of the real machines run from 2-25 (plan for a ridiculous number to be safe), with 26-98 for virtual machines. Most of this has been pretty much done flying by the seat of my pants so far, so this is a good chance to set it up right this time.

Overall, I'm really pleased with this project. It only took a couple of hours (and I was juggling other stuff at the same time), only cost me $6 for the network card and has WAY more functionality. Definitely give Smoothwall a look if you've been considering something similar.