SmoothWall and DWL-2200AP

[njackson256]

Hi everyone, I have wanted to build a SmoothWall Firewall for a long time now. Finally it is becoming a reality. What I want to do is take my Cable Modem and connect into, say Eth0. Then I want to connect an Access Point (D-Link DWL-2200AP) into Eth1 for instance. Just want to make sure, but does everyone think this config will work okay?

[rappermas]

It should work in theory, depending on if you set it up right. I have wanted one of my older PCs to serve my network for a while now--I just never got around to doing it.,

[tony85poon]

Try Firestarter

[root] # yum install firestarter

[rdwinders]

I would agree with tony85poon but smoothwall installed on an old 400 MHz machine that I had while FC wouldn't. I don't think the old box had enough RAM to run FC with a GUI. The Smoothwall install went real smooth and in about 15 minutes I had a firewall running. It calls your NIC to Comcast 'Red,' and the NIC to your LAN 'Green.' Red gets its IP from Comcast and 'Green' gets the reserved private address that you configure. You can enable DHCP from your 'Green' if you want, which would assign an address to your access point which in turn can assin addresses within your private subnet to WiFi cards that seek one.
My one problem with Smoothwall is that I never figure out how my Lan machines could get their updates and RPM transactions started. I seems that they need to get DNS queries and responses (Port 53?) through and Smoothwall wasn't having none of it.

[Omega Blue]

How could you do anything on the Net without DNS queries?

[rdwinders]

Good question!
Web surfing was handled by a proxy server that was running inside Smoothwall. It had it's own port and the browser settings(Firefox-Preferences) were pointed to use that 'IP:port#' except for addresses on the LAN. I used another browser(Galeon, with it's home page set to: https://smoothwall's local(Green NIC) IP) to access the administration fuctions on the 'smoothwall' machine - logs, settings and the like.
When Firefox requested a web page, the request went to the Squid proxy server and the proxy took care of it, DNS , of course, and all, then sent the reply back.
By default, Smoothwall offered three ports (after the proxy server was enabled through the admin center). 800, 81 and 441. Firefox was successful going out port 800. Galeon got to the admin center through either 441 (https and prefered) or 81(http), I think it was 441 folowed by a login.
Whatever I tried, I couldn't get the same situation set up for RPM or YUM..