Silent Smoothwall

Chris Chan · Post by **Chris Chan** » Sat Mar 29, 2008 7:20 pm

I received this box free from my uncle, not really as a gift but as a "I'm tired of this taking up space in my basement, so you can have it because you will put it to use" thing. So I immediately started converting it to a Smoothwall box, which I hope to have in service Monday when I get more ethernet cables and switches. Its specs are:

200MHz Pentium Pro
64MB EDO RAM
40GB laptop hard drive (worth more than the rest of the system)
S3 ViRGE video
2 ADMtek 10/100 cards (DEC Tulip driver)
1 D-link 10/100 card (Via Rhine driver)

Noisemakers:
80mm Arctic Cooling exhaust fan (~7v through fanmate)
80mm temp controlled PSU fan (pretty low)
Hard drive (nearly inaudible)

And now for pictures.

Inside view

Closeup of HDD mounting

Front

Back

Where it will reside, next to my server (the keyboards on top of the machines will be replaced with a Sun Ultra 10 (my next silencing project) and network switches)

I hope you like it.

majicjack_11 · Post by **majicjack_11** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 7:49 am

I love smoothwall. I have it on an older comp of mine as well and has been going strong for a couple years. The features that smoothy has/is capable of is truly amazing!

Good luck and have fun!

aimfox · Post by **aimfox** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 10:42 am

lol at the hard drive, dont u need something to cool it? tangling it up looks kinda make it hot

Chris Chan · Post by **Chris Chan** » Sun Mar 30, 2008 12:40 pm

aimfox wrote:lol at the hard drive, dont u need something to cool it? tangling it up looks kinda make it hot

Eh, it's a two watt laptop drive, and it's not quite as tangled up as it looks. It's certainly better cooled than in most laptops. If I start experiencing stability problems due to it, or hddtemp gives me high temperatures, I'll think about changing it.

Chris Chan · Post by **Chris Chan** » Mon Mar 31, 2008 6:02 pm

Update: It seems I will not be using Smoothwall, since it doesn't support IPv6. Anyone have a recommendation for a firewall distro that supports IPv6?

sallyxi · Post by **sallyxi** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:03 am

maybe there has some problems with inner fan of laptop.

kadiir · Post by **kadiir** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:00 am

Chris Chan wrote:Update: It seems I will not be using Smoothwall, since it doesn't support IPv6. Anyone have a recommendation for a firewall distro that supports IPv6?

I don't have a recommendation, but I googled using these terms and found some interesting articles:

ipv6 firewall "open source"

The 4th link ("Status of Open Source and commercial IPv6 firewall implementations") was an interesting read.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 3:55 pm

ROFL, are those ISA slots I see?

Anyway, certainly nice deviation from typical threads here. Love 8 expansion slots on the motherboard, most you get nowadays is 6 and of those only 4 are usable because of oversized videocards.

Chris Chan · Post by **Chris Chan** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 4:43 pm

Yup they are ISA slots. But only seven total are usable on that motherboard - the last PCI and first ISA slot share a backplane space. Gotta love single slot S3 Virges!

kadiir: That's certainly an interesting read. I ended up selecting Debian and writing/hacking together a script to set it up as a router. However, the main reason I selected Debian - ipv6 - doesn't work as I would like it to. Radvd doesn't give my hosts sane routes and causes the kernel to complain. One of my friends with a debian router ran into this same problem and had to recompile the kernel.

DrJ · Post by **DrJ** » Wed Apr 02, 2008 7:53 pm

Consider m0n0wall. It is FreeBSD-based, and certainly handles ipv6. You won't even need your hard drive if you don't want to use it.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Another one is pfSense: http://pfsense.com/index.php?id=26 , which is a fork of m0n0wall.

drees · Post by **drees** » Tue Apr 15, 2008 11:06 pm

I can vouch for pfSense.

You can run it on this ALIX embedded hardware like this: ALIX.2C3 Kit: Board + Power Supply + CF card + Red Case. This has a Geode LX800 (500MHz), 256MB ram, 512MB flash and 3 NICs. It pulls 5w from the wall when running according to my Kill-a-Watt. We've got one at work to load balance a DSL and T1 line along with some NATting, filtering and VPNs - works great!

We initially tested pfSense on a spare desktop pc - but that thing pulled 80watts and was vastly overpowered for what we are doing with it.

Nil Einne · Post by **Nil Einne** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 11:39 am

Yes I know this is very old but came across it while searching for something unrelated.

I can vouch for m0n0wall supporting IPv6 in the latest beta. I've been using it (IPv6 I mean) for several months and it works fine. As you may already know, it can even fit on a tiny CF and doesn't demand much from the hardware. It works very well for what it does so provided you don't want anything it doesn't IMHO it's your best bet.

I haven't really tried pfSense but from what I can tell it doesn't support IPv6 yet (was looking in to it for testing something)

drees · Post by **drees** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 1:57 pm

Nil Einne wrote:I haven't really tried pfSense but from what I can tell it doesn't support IPv6 yet (was looking in to it for testing something)

You're right - it doesn't yet. Not sure when it's scheduled to show up, either.

Monkeh16 · Post by **Monkeh16** » Mon Mar 16, 2009 3:28 pm

Chris Chan wrote:I ended up selecting Debian and writing/hacking together a script to set it up as a router. However, the main reason I selected Debian - ipv6 - doesn't work as I would like it to. Radvd doesn't give my hosts sane routes and causes the kernel to complain. One of my friends with a debian router ran into this same problem and had to recompile the kernel.

Like recompiling the kernel is such an effort

Personally I'd pick $DISTRO_OF_CHOICE (I use Gentoo, which is far from ideal for a PP) and use shorewall (actually, that's what I'm doing, although I don't use IPv6).

DuxBellorum · Post by **DuxBellorum** » Fri Apr 17, 2009 8:27 am

Yeah, Smoothwall 3.0 is good stuff