stochasticflux

A sleek firewall from a wrap board and m0n0wall

July 10th, 2006

For the past couple of years I have been running Smoothwall on an old pc I rescued from the dumpster. This has been a great method of securing my home network however living in a third floor apartment in the southern part of the United States heat can be an issue, especially in the summer time, and running an extra pc doesn’t help. Therefore I began toying with the idea of using an embedded pc as a firewall. I decided to go with the WRAP.1C-2 board from PC Engines due to the great price/performance ratio compared to other options. In total the board, case, and adapter came to $164 before shipping from Netgate.

For software I decided to run m0n0wall. I would have prefered a linux based solution over a FreeBSD based product but it appeared to be the best solution for my situation. The setup was a breeze and it turns out my 64MB flash card was overkill as the entire image is under 8MB. After working with m0n0wall’s web gui to setup the system I couldn’t stop thinking this is a fantastic product! m0n0wall’s features are enough for almost any home or office network and the configuration is a breeze. Most interesting is that the entire boot-time configuration is written in PHP. Smoothwall and my dumpster pc served me well for a long time but m0n0wall and my WRAP box provide a more feature rich firewall in a much sleeker and cooler running package.

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