Real Recycling: Saving the Universe 1 computer at a time

[Rhino Chaser]

Don't throw away your old computers,turn them into a firewall instead.

If you have an older box with PCI slots, you can easily buy some cheap Gigabit cards, install iPcop and have a solid firewall appliance.

Instead of renewing w/ Norton this year I decided to change things up a bit.

I went with Nod32 as my antivirus and not only is it faster than Norton, I barely notice that it is even there.

The company that developed Nod32, Eset, also has a security suite, but I wasn't as happy with their firewall as I was with the antivirus system.

So I did some investigating and found a free linux client called IPcop. I was recently given an old box with a PIII and 1 gig of ram. I added some Gigabit network cards, and fired up IPcop. It took a little research, but the program installed with out a hitch.

There are even add-ons that will also screen out malware and viruses, and act as spam filters. All in all it is a very robust application all managed by web based gui on your LAN.

Now I have a firewall that sceens all traffic and even segregates my wireless from my wired traffic. Best off all it isn't using resources on any of my PC's!

Here is a link to the site: IPCop.org :: The bad packets stop here!.

[Peench]

Awesome man! Nice to know you are doing something productive with your time when you're not gaming with us!

[Rhino Chaser]

Thanks for rubbing it in!!

[Peench]

Originally Posted by Rhino Chaser

Thanks for rubbing it in!!

That's what she said...

[Rhino Chaser]

At least you thought it was a she....

[lovekeiiy]

nice Rhino. I use Smoothwall 3.0. It's very similar to Icop. At one time, it was all smoothwall, but part of the group split off, and became Icop; I forgot what the reason behind the split. I've been using Smoothwall for about three years now. I found out about smoothwall from CNET on a suggested use for old computers. Here is my machine:






I got the computer from a neighbor whose hard drive crashed. I put in a 10G HDD I had around, put in an two NICs, and bam, there she is. Mine actually splits my network in two. I put the gaming consoles on one network and anything I feel my compromise my network, and the rest another. Both networks are secured, but they're separate.

The nice thing about smoothwall, beside being around quite some time, is that it's based on a commercial product. I use the free version under the open source. Some of the commercial stuff is actually tested on the open source product. Like Icop, Smoothwall has a huge community, and a lot of homebrew projects.

The site is at: Welcome to Express 3.0! - SmoothWall.org

[Rhino Chaser]

Nice work! I love your setup! Mine is still a jumble of wires because I have been finalizing and learning on the fly.

I wasn't even completely sure what NIC was green at first!!

Anyway I looked at Smoothwall, but I liked the copfilter (copfilter.org) addon for IPCop.

Does smoothwall have addons like this? And do you need to join "mysmoothwall?" It almost looked like you didn't manage the firewall locally. It did seem like smoothwall my be slightly more user friendly though..

Killer pictures!! I can't wait until mine gets there.

[lovekeiiy]

I haven't gotten into all that, but I'm sure there is. Here's the link to the homebrew community page thread listing all the current homebrew mods available: linky. I haven't gotten into the homebrew stuff. Since I use McAfee free on my computers, I haven't made it priority to get into the some of the other features of SW.

I should consider changing one of the settings to closed, so it make it more difficult to hack into, but may run into a few problems that I will need to research first on how to solve.

As for signing up for SW, no you don't have to. It's only if you want to post, and possibly, use the search function in the forums. In SW3, there is an anonomus registration on your system so the SW people can see what hardware people are using and what problem they may be having. If you do register, you just give an email address. I would suggests to do this, since there is an easy find link to the PDF manuals in case you ever need to find them later.

By no means am I knocking Icop. There is a reason it's still around: it works well for it's design.

The one thing I wish they would incorporate, which my router did, was make an easy to read DHCP client list, rather than having to read the DHCP log. Some of my devices--printer server and VOIP--are always checking their IP, so the list if lengthy, where the router just gave a list showing device name and IP. Things I like are the traffic graphs on the networks--day, week, year--live traffic monitoring, a page giving all the network info on the networks, and so forth. It would be interesting to see traffic based in individual devices.

There's still some wire spaghetti, but it's only in a few spots. The wire channels hide a lot of stuff. I found I was loosing a lot of desk space for all my network equipment--router, modem, print server, etc--that it made sense to figure out how to mount the stuff under the desk. One of these days, I'll figure out a cabnet situation to hide the computers I have sitting on the floor under the desk; yes a KVM switch works well to keep save space.