IPCop vs Smoothwall (vs Gentoo)

[andres101]

I have a P166 that I would like to set up as a home router. The sole perpose of the box will be to route internet traffic (NAT & http) and maybe serve a couple of PHP pages (apache/mod_php/postgres).

The only linux distro that I am comfortable with is Gentoo, which will take weeks to compile on a P166 (not a problem though). I'm sure that getting to know another distro will be fearly easy.

I've read a lot about smoothwall and it seems to be great for what I want to use it for. Lately IPCop has been popping up all over these forums, but I've never heard anything of it anywhere else. I went to ipcop.org and it appears to be a software package that you install on top of a distro.

Can I perhaps run IPCop on top of Gentoo? Is smoothwall better suited for this? How difficult is it to get php/postgres running on smoothwall?

Any advice will be apreciated.

 

[bb_matt]

They are both mini linux distributions that do everything for you in terms of a firewall. They can't be installed on top of an existing distro - they have to be stand alone.

What you need :-

Two Network cards
A CDROM
A keyboard and monitor - temporarily needed for install, can run headless after that
A copy of IPCop or Smoothwall - download the iso and burn to cd

When you install IPCop or Smoothwall, it auto detects one of your network cards which you setup as the Green interface - internal network. You will connect this to your switch (hub) after that, you select which network type you want - you will most likely go with RED / GREEN. Your other network card will be probed and you configure that to RED, setting it up as PPPoE - this you connect to your DSL modem, assuming it's an ethernet one and not a USB one. I think that IPCop and Smoothwall can detect and run some USB modems, but I've never had to try that.

Once your all installed, you can take the keyboard and monitor off your firewall box - first setup BIOS to not halt on errors such as no keyboard or monitor.

You then bung it in a corner out of the way and connect to it via a web browser on your hub to complete the configuration.

There's plenty of documentation on the respective websites.

In terms of serving web pages, you'll have to either add mods to IPCop or Smoothwall (if they exist) as they are both bare bones releases - there's no apache installed, or PHP - they are very lightweight.

Your best bet would be to run a webserver on another box on your internal network and NAT into it - then use dyndns.

Here's my experiment :-

http://bbmatt.dyndns.org/

I've done nothing with it, because I have a hosting account at hetzner, I recently setup dyndns as an experiment.

That is running on a slackware 10.1 box.

If your a Linux guru, ignore this next bit ...

Setting up Gentoo as a firewall is not as easy as a simple IPCop or Smoothwall solution as there's a lot of configuration that will need to be done.
You can get tools to configure IPchains for you, but it's almost inevitable that you'll need to get your hands dirty getting everything setup right.
It's also entirely possible to end up with a firewall full of holes.

 

[sparklehorse]

There is a nice tutorial for shorewall on the gentoo board: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2187309.html
but you will have to do everything yourself

I have smoothwall installed. Installing it is real easy, so if you need something quick, try it.
As far as I know, IPCop is based on smoothwall - haven't tried it though.

I can also recommend http://www.coyotelinux.com/
Coyote installs on a single floppy and is also very easy to install. Obviously it does not have all the nice features of ipcop or smoothwall, but it does work. There is a few addons for it as well, and you can install it on a small harddrive instead of a floppy if you want to.

ATM I have smoothwall to play with, and if something goes wrong, I just insert the coyote floppy and reboot to have a working setup again

 

[bb_matt]

IPCop has branched significantly from Smoothwall - I was a smoothwall user for years, but have recently switched to IPCop as it seems better supported and more feature rich.

 

[andres101]

thanks for the info!!

i think that i will initially go for Coyote just to get something up.

i will then start playing with smoothwall and once i have that working, I'll install IPCop. once that is working, i'll go for a gentoo setup. i prefer knowing what is under the hood.

i will evaluate all products and then decide what will work for my setup. so much for finding The Perfect Distro ®

once again, thanks for the info!

 

[andres101]

oh, almost forgot. i had a quick look through my ADSL routers docs and it doesn't appear to be able to run in "bridged" mode.

will all 4 above mentioned solutions will support setting the router up as a gateway?

 

[sparklehorse]

yes