To harden up my local network and to go without running a software firewall on all of my machines.
This will in theory free up resources on the local machines and provide some piece of mind that a hardware firewall is protecting the network.

My intention is to spend as little money as possible for this project, so with that in mind I had to work out what I have lying around at home that I could use...the answer was not much :(

• Case: Tsunami MidiATX Case - It was the cheapest and smallest case I could find, no real pleasing aesthetics
• CPU: Intel Celeron 2.8GHz - This was a left over CPU from an older box, it'll do nicely for the Firewall
• Mobo: Asus P5GC-MX All in one - Again nothing special just the cheapest (unfortunately not my normal Gigabyte mobo)
• RAM: 512MB Corsair Value Select DDR2 533 - The box doesnt need anything more than that
• HDD: 80GB Western Digital IDE - A spare hard drive that I had left over
• Optical: Sony 52x CD-ROM - Another spare piece of kit, will only use it during the install
• PSU: 400w generic PSU that came with the case
• NIC-1: Netgear 10/100
• NIC-2: D-Link 10/100

I had some spare NIC's that I could of used but I thought for the price being only $15 each it would be worthwhile buying acouple of new ones seeing that they are a pretty key component in a firewall.

All of the parts are at the cheap end of the price scale but we're still using some big name brands in Corsair and Asus so they should go the distance without falling over.

The most expensive component turned out to be my new ADSL Modem, a Linksys AM300. My current modem is totally incompatible to run in front of a firewall as it does not support Bridging mode. So the hunt was on for one that does and it was pretty hard to find one to be honest. The AM300 does support Bridging mode and with a bit of googling and searching on forums like Whirlpool I was able to confirm all I needed to know.

The real hard part was selecting the software that would be the firewall OS on the box. For this project the following were the selection:

• mOnOwall
• Smoothwall Express
• pfSense
• Untangle

Both mOnOwall and pfSense are BSD based firewalls, while Smoothwall and Untangle are based of Linux. First up I ended up ruling Untangle out of the race as the Systems Requirements were quite high as it is designed more as an Enterprise Gateway with the ability to run AV software and other products. Which sounds like an excellent idea but probably not really worthwhile in the home environment.


I've used mOnOwall before and know it's a good product so it was going to be my fallback OS of choice. pfSense is a spin-off from mOnOwall and looks to be an excellent product, but from my research it's still just slightly unpolished. Probably the next release it'll be spot-on.

This leaves us with Smoothwall Express 3.0, I was fairly impressed with Smoothwall partly due to the huge community who use the product and it was the only OS that had both an excellent Web GUI and Documentation that was PDFed so you could download it and print out so you could have it on hand while you were doing the install...which may seem a minor thing but when the net is downed while your doing the setup it could prove invaluable to have the Doco right at hand for guidance....Smoothwall was the choice for the firewall box.

Pretty simple build for this box, had no issues with the case. I ended up removing the side funnel that directed air towards the CPU as it was making the CPU fan sound like a train going through a tunnel which I thought was a bit annoying considering the box will be pretty much on 24hrs a day. The fan on the PSU is a little noisy but it is only a generic PSU so I wasn't expecting it to be in the class of the Corsair PSU that I use on my Mediabox.

My main issue was with the motherboard as it only had the one IDE channel. It didn't even come into my mind when I was sourcing the mobo to check that side of things as both my old HDD and CD-ROM are IDE devices. Putting them on the same channel isn't a major issue...it would be if it was a gaming rig. The real problem came with the IDE ribbon cable, it wasnt long enough to reach the optical drive and HDD both at the same time. A bit of re-arranging with the CD-ROM in the bottom slot and the HDD in the floppy drive bay I was just able to reach both. With that sorted I moved onto the modem.

The Linksys has a very nice web GUI, much better than Netgear products in my opinion. All I needed to do was put the modem into Bridging mode, update the firmware and change the default password for the GUI. A nice easy job thanks to the GUI.

With doco in hand, just incase everything went Pete Tong we headed of with the install of the OS.

I must admit it took a little while to complete the basic install of Smoothwall, but in the end it all went smoothly (no pun intended). Smoothwall uses a very simple colour coding scheme for your NIC's, just write down the MAC addresses for them so you can tell which one's which. Green for the internal interface and Red for the external. Just gotta give the Green interface an IP address and setup PPoE on the Red interface and it'll all work ;)

You can config your DHCP at this time aswell, and set passwords for the console and the Web GUI....prolly takes around 40mins to complete the install.

Smoothwall offers a very rich Web GUI with graphs and logs and config options, which is one of the reasons why I choose to use it.

I spent some time working through all of the options in the GUI including setting up my PPoE settings, Port Forwarding and some of the extra services that Smoothwall offers.

All in all there is still some tweaking that can be done but I was able to get all of the important parts configured within the hour. The Smoothwall Admin guide is a very handy piece of kit to help you through the Web GUI.

Overall I'm pretty happy with Smoothwall and would recommend it to others as their home firewall. I did have to play around a little bit with the rules and stuff to get everything flowing how I would like it...and at the time of writing this I haven't downloaded any torrents yet...something I'm sure that may require some tweaking.

I found I had some issues getting Citrix to work through the firewall, but I eventually worked out a work around which I also use for gaming on-line.

I'm glad that I spent the time and acouple of dollars in re-implementing a hardware firewall solution at home again as the piece of mind that my network is protected is worth every dollar.