Networks Need help/advice about setting up a smoothie

Hey all,

I've been digging up my old hardware, and I have 2 PCs lying about, I'm pretty much a n00b at this networking stuff but I'm eager to learn

1)200Mhz P1 mmx, 64MB RAM, 2GB HDD which might be duff.
2)266Mhz AMD k6-2 @ 300, also 64MB, and I've got a 6GB HDD hanging off this one.

I was thinking of installing SmoothWall on the P200, 2 GB harddisk should do. However my application is kinda funny. I want the firewall to protect my room only (all the other people have fancy firewalls running on their rigs, not for me though!). So you have incoming ADSL -> router -> hub -> PCs. My rig is on one port of the hub, but if I chuck 3 NICs into that old pentium, could I run smoothwall to act as a switch (or hub) and protect my rigs at the same time? I'm also not sure of what network cable to use. If my pentium rig is acting as a switch (hub), do I use UTP or cross cable to connect the NIC on the firewall to my main rig? Is there anything else I'm missing here?

If, no, when I get that working, I'd like to run Apache on linux on the AMD K6 machine, maybe clock it down to stock speeds and set the fan down to 5v. What would I have to do to get my AMD to run as a server IE what settings do I change and do I have to change anything on the router.

Any comments/suggestions? Answers would be nice too

 

About the smoothwall, you should have 2 nics on it one to connect to the rest of the netwrk, and one to connect to a hub of your pcs. Then you should set the one that connects to the rest as the inernet connection.

 

you might look at m0n0wall http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/, it is also a nice little firewall, and can be run without an HDD.

 

Hmmm, I'm thinking of using the 3 NICs (cos I allready have them) instead of buying a hub, I don't have that much money laying around. That hub we allread have is a) full and b) not mine, so I can't grab that and connect my pcs to that. I have one ethernet plug to play with as it were so I need to share out that plug. Hence the three NICs

 

well IMO it would be cheaper to just buy a hub. But if you want to use 3 NICs you will need crossovers for the 2 pcs and a regualar cable for the "router" and the hub.

 

The entire project should cost me about €0 and mebbe 2 euros for the cables, I'm too damn lazy to get a hub anyways. Besides, I can then finally say I have a machine running linux It'd prolly raise my geek score and I just think there's something sexy about having an old pc running as a firewall, even if it doesn't serve any real purpose (besides getting rid of nasty unwanted traffic)

That and I might just have enough paint left over to paint a little AT case Thanks for the help, just one more question: How much bother is it going to be to use 2 NICs for the safe green interface and 1 for the red, unprotected bit? Is SmoothWall going to be a lot of bother or should it be easy to do?

 

Smoothwall is very simple to use. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants a custom hardware/software firewall. It will be easy for you to config it to your needs.

 

Thanks for the help Casey

 

No prob ask any time.

 

If you're going to use Smoothwall to sit an apache server behind, you'll need 3 nics, 1 RED - Danger, connected to the outside world, 1 GREEN - Safe, connected to your network and protected from the internet and 1 ORANGE - Protected but accessable from the interenet for your Apache Server.

I'm not sure how easy it is to set more than 1 Green interface on a smoothwall box, the easiest thing is to connect it to a router/switch which will then protect anything you hang off it.