Firewall Information and Hardware Setup Guide - Firewall Setup and Configuration
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The setup
Smoothwall Express 2.0 is downloadable as a single-CD ISO image. The image can be burned to CD-R using almost any burning software. I used Nero Burning ROM 6, went to Recorder, Burn Image and loaded up the .iso for burning to CD.
With the CD burned and machine assembled (with CDROM installed), we perform our initial startup. First, we want to go into our BIOS settings and make a few changes. These aren’t mandatory, but I like to keep things tidy.
First, this motherboard is capable of booting off of the CDROM and I don’t have (nor plan to have) a floppy drive, so I will change drive A: to None. I do plan on running this machine “headless” (i.e. without a monitor, keyboard, mouse), so at the bottom of my initial screen, I will set the “Halt on Error” to None This will allow the machine to boot without it having a cow over things not being attached. Note, some boards will allow you to boot without a video card installed, others do require one, regardless of whether there is a monitor plugged into it. If your board is one of the latter, then any old PCI video card will do. Since we are on this page, now is a good time to verify that the hard drive is being seen as Primary Master (or HDD0, equivalent to Linux /dev/hda). If it isn’t then the installation won’t go since the software expects the drive to be set that way.
I also like to disable the COM and LPT ports, the onboard floppy drive and the second IDE driver as well as any other potential resource-grabber that won’t be utilized.
I set the boot sequence to CDROM, HDD0 and save/exit. Note that if your machine is not capable of booting off the CDROM, then you’ll need a floppy drive and a bootable disk that will allow you to boot the CDROM.
With all my changes to the BIOS made and saved, I insert the CD, resume bootup and let ‘er rip.
The bootup page announces that it will erase the entire hard drive, so if there is anything important on it, you’ll want to move it off beforehand. Also note that the software will send statistics about your machine when it connects to smoothwall.org, so if you are paranoid, be sure go to the smoothwall forums for information on disabling that. Hit Return and the installation begins. This is a standard installation, so we will select install from CDROM. You get one last chance to abort the operation appears before the drive is wiped. Hit OK.
Configuration
Once the drive is formatted, partitioned and the software is installed, the program goes into Configuration mode. It needs to find and install the drivers for the GREEN network card, which will connect to the trusted network. You can manually select the appropriate driver from a list or allow the Auto-probe to do it for you. For the most part, Auto-probe is your best bet.
Next is the main setup menu. You can get into this at any time by logging in as “root” on the smoothie and typing in “setup” and Return.
The first option, Restore Configuration, is useful if you had to reinstall Smoothwall for whatever reason and have backed up your old setup files. Keyboard mapping allows one to set the keyboard language. Seeing as the Smoothwall Open Source Project is a British group, it’s only natural that the default language is UK.
Hostname sets the hostname for your Smoothie. It defaults to “smoothwall” but for those who have a naming scheme for their networks (or have multiple firewalls to maintain), one can rename it.
The Web Proxy setting is for those ISPs that require the subscriber to use their proxy.
If using an internal ISDN card, then the ISDN Configuration dialog would set it up. Similarly, the ADSL Configuration allows one to set up when using an USB ADSL modem. In our instance, the internet connection is DSL via an Ethernet modem, so we will be setting up our smoothie as a PPPoE through the Network Configuration menu.
Next: Network Configuration and DHCP >>
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