Is this a good firewall?
 

Well, first I've to start saying that I understand nothing about Firewall and Internet Sharing. Since the number of PC's I've got home are growing (my wife will need one, and I need to play Xbox Live as well) it's time to get a Switch. I came across the following:

http://www.linuxstore.se/html/artikel/9546.html

Where it read:"Bredbandsrouter med inbyggd brandvägg, perfekt för dej som vill dela internet mellan flera datorer och samtidigt ha ett bra skydd". , means in good english:

"Broadband router with inbuilt firewall. Perfect for you who wants to share Internet among many computers and have a good protection at the same time".

What I want to do, basically is:

So, basically what I need to know is, is it possible to not only share the Internet Connection with that Firewall/Router, but also share files between those computers?. Sounds stupid, but as I never did (or needed to) anything like that, I'm wondering :).

P.S: I hope LQ.org won't thing that I'm advertising that company by any means. It's just the case that Firewall is the only crap I've found that I can afford :). Any problems, feel free to remove the link...

Thanks in advance!

In short: Yes!

You can do everything you wanted, and have it set up in no time flat. Er... well, probably no time flat.

The biggest portion of your time will be setting up static IP addresses or DHCP. You can go either way. Static IPs might be easier if your machines aren't already setup for DHCP.

If you go with static IPs, you may have to modify your gateway config for eth0, but that will probably be about it (you'd be in the same file punching in your static IP anyway).

If you go with DHCP, the router will act as your DHCP server, and you'll have immediate connection sharing among machines (everything is updated on the fly).

I couldn't decipher a model/part number from the web site to find the English counterpart. I was hoping to glance at what firewall settings are available and the interface. I have a wireless SMC router, and to be honest, configuring the firewall is a little complex. You have to create a service (specifying a port range and othe stuff), and then enable the service to go through the firewall. You probably only need to worry about that if you have a server behind the firewall. My SMC router is preconfigured to allow any outgoing connection requests, and will automatically allow any incoming requests related to those previous requests.

Wow, thanks a lot Dark_Helmet!

That's a lot of good info. I'm ordering that thing now then :). It's about time for me to get a firewall... and I will need Internet sharing too. One of my PC's will act as a server, well, kinda, for FTP and Apache. But that's about it :).

I have to admit, sounds really, really difficult. But hey, Linux was not easy at the beginning either :).

As soon as I get that firewall (about Tuesday/Wed) I will let you know how it went, and post any question in there.

So far, very big thanks :)

Excellent. Make sure you take a big whiff of that new-computer-electronics-smell :)

And just holler if you need any help. I've been tinkering some with mine recently as well.

lol :). Yeah, there's nothing better then new computer stuff smell. I know that you can buy a perfume with the smell of new cars to put in your old car (I'm serious). Wish there was one with computers smell :p.

Have you looked at Smoothwall as a Linux firewall.
There is plenty of documentation for it.
I've been using it for about 3 months now
and its pretty good if you want an
out-of-the-box firewall.
I do have a few issues with it ...
but that just means I have a lot of learning to do
re Linux in general

My set up is basically
Internet -> Modem -> Smoothwall -> Network Hub -> Network
This works for me
However I must admit I'm looking around
for another distro as Smoothwall
does alright as the basic level
but to do any thing more complex
you have to pay for ( big bucks )

Floppy

Thanks floppywhopper!

I've heard about Smoothwall, but I've never truly checked it out. A friend recommended me to use one of my computers as a router and in that computer put as many network cards as necessary. Problem is, that would require too much tweaking, and the computer I have to spare, wont have all PCI slots for the task. Besides, I start to be too old for tweaking (25 yo next week) :)

But I will take a look on to it. It's always cool to learn something new :)

Thanks again!

No worries

Check out www.smoothwall .org
also http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/index

Smoothwall will only let you have
1 NIC for each of your
Red, Orange and Green zones

so buy a hub for your Green zone to connect
a/ to your Smoothwall
b/ each computer to each other

make sure if you are serious about Smoothwall
to download and read
very carefully
all the smoothwall documentation
before you go down this road
and check out the smoothwall forum
Smoothwall is not without its problems and quirks

I'm a Mandrake man and Smoothwall took me
3 goes before I got the installation right
so go carefully

any other questions just ask

floppy whopper

Hey Megaman! Did you get that router in yet? Or did you go with a system-built firewall?

I was expecting a "Yay I got it working!" or a "Dark, I hate you; what did you get me into?" message :D

Just curious

Hi there Dark mate!. Sorry for the delay to answer you. To say the truth, I've totally forgotten abut this thread, since for some odd reason, I did not get an e-mail reply from LQ.org. I've been missing a lot of e-mails lately, so I think that Novell (www.myrealbox.com) is having some trouble :).

I did, I've got that firewall. It came later though, arrived on Thursday(on my birthday, so I could not play much with it or at LQ.org). The Post Office did a mistake and charged me about 12 USD more then it should(and the worst is, I cannot hate the Post Office, since I work for the Post Office, lol), so I was pretty mad, but bought anyway. The seller will fix that by paying the difference though :).

Everything works perfectly now. I did, had a lot of problems trying to configure the Firewall so my computer running Apache would be visible outside the LAN. Took me a lot of time to figure that out. The manual (.pdf) shipped with the Firewall is pretty good, but I'm quite a newbie at this.

When I finally got that to work, another problem: How on earth would I share files between two Linux Machines? 10 minutes searching on Google and I came across the Network File System (NFS) and 10 minutes more I had that installed and the computers were visible through each other. Really neat, and much easier then I expected :D.

The Firewall's full name (in english this time, ghehe) is:

SMC Networks: Barricade
4-port 10/100Mbps Broadband Router with Advanced Firewall Protection.

Now I've got a little more work to do:

- Decide between SuSE 9.1 Pro or SuSe Linux Enterprise Server 9 to run as server (check out the thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=226211

- Learn how to setup a FTP server with proFTPd, which I never did.

I think this is a great start, and it's so cool to finally be able to have one machine as server. I cannot let it be 24/7 yet. Need to improve the cooling system of it, but I really am happy.

Thanks for the help mate! Feel free to recommend any distribution as Server too :). I'm just thinking about SuSE 9 LSE because I got a free evaluation copy from novell. Thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...se+from+Novell

Cheers!