Lots of computer fun on Saturday. I finally managed to move the last two services (DHCP and Squid) off of the old server on Saturday and turned it off.
Then I thought it would be a good plan to upgrade the firewall (currently a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM) by replacing it with the old server’s husk (a 200Mhz Pentium Pro with 128MB RAM and an old Dell PowerEdge II RAID controller with dual SCSI drives.)
So I started playing around. Sean dug up an open souce firewall called Smoothwall and gave me a CD, so I booted that up.
Unfortunately, the ‘free’ version doesn’t support SCSI drives. Only IDE. So, just to see what it was like I stuffed an old 4GB IDE drive in and installed it.
Smoothwall looks cool, but it’s not suited for what I want. It’s designed for a home network that only has one IP address. It only does port forwarding and no inbound NAT. I have an 8 IP block for my home (because I can) and Smoothwall won’t deal with it. So that’s one down.
So I poke around a bit on Freshmeat and SourceForge looking for firewall projects.
Lots of people with scripts to generate IPTables rule sets, but not really what I had in mind.
Then I found Firewall Builder
Holy cow. This is way cool. It’s a GUI firewall manangement client that will create ruleset for IPChains, IPTables, IPFW, PF and PIX. It runs on a Linux workstation and includes RCS and the ability to push rules to the firewall. It looks great.
But this means that I need to run Linux on my firewall again. Not a big deal, but what version?
I have Fedora Core 3 on CD, so I try and install that. Boom. Isolinux tries to boot and then says it can’t find my CD drive. WTF?
A bunch of Googling indicates that it might be a BIOS issue. The motherboard is an old Intel board (I think, but I can’t find any labels to tell me what it really is) so I head over to Intel.com to see if I can find a BIOS.
Wonder of wonders, Intel still has legacy BIOS downloads and even tells me how to figure out what board it is (a VX440FX or something.)
So I upgrade the BIOS from 1.00.05 to 1.00.18 and ba-da-bing the Fedora CD boots right up.
Whoopie.
Until… The installer then tells me that it can’t find any drives to install on. WTF again?
More Googling. Lots more Googling.
Hmm… Looks like Fedora Core 1 supported the PE II RAID card, but they removed that in Core 3. Thanks guys. I can’t seem to find any drivers either (but I didn’t spend a lot of time on that.)
So, once more I install the IDE drive and then I load up Fedore Core 3. That’s not too bad, but after it’s been running about an hour I start seeing IDE errors on the console.
Wonderful.
So what I’m going to try when I get back from Chicago (I’m going to Chicago this week for RSA SecurID training) is to install Fedora Core 1 (I hope) and then upgrade to Core 3.
Think it will work?
