m0n0wall: DIY Firewall

If you have an old PC lying around that you were too lazy to throw out, don’t change your ways in a hurry. It may come in handy. If you have the need, you can turn it in to a first-rate NAT firewall router.

Why? Well, sure, you can buy a router for $80 bucks and, to be honest, a cheap D-Link or Linksys router is all you need most of the time. But if that kicks the bucket and you need a replacement or if you take a look at the m0n0wall GUI, and fall in love, you may find this great little firewall is the perfect way to get your Pentium II back in the game.

The reason old machines are perfect for DIY appliances (like m0n0wall) is that, while you won’t have much luck running XP (and Vista, you’d be dreaming) on them, they have ample grunt to run a stripped down Linux/BSD operating system.

m0n0wall is a FreeBSD-based system with a bit of a difference. It’s entire boot-time command sequence is done in PHP and all system configuration is stored in an XML file, making it ridiculously resource efficient. Not only that, but the whole install image manages to squeeze in under 6MB. That said, every megabyte sure packs a punch. It does stateful packet filtering, NAT, DHCP, SNMP, IPsec and PPTP VPN, DynDNS, Wake-on-LAN, captive portal and traffic shaping. It also has a great SVG based traffic grapher and one of the best web GUIs around.

So how do you get it up and running? If you just want to try it or you’re not bothered to do a hard drive install, you can download the CD-ROM image and run it straight from the CD. You can even do this on your primary machine (although not recommended) without it messing with Windows. Just pop a floppy or USB stick in to store the config file.

If you’re using it long term, grab the Generic-PC image. If you need a hand with setup, take a look here.

Bottom line, this product is amazing… and secure… and open source… and free. Give it a try.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Tags: captive portal, firewall, m0n0wall, nat, router, security, vpn