Zano

Smoothwall Express 3.0 upgrade

I have been running a Smoothwall 2.0 firewall at home for the last 2 years. I installed it on an old Dell P133 box It’s old but good and works fine for this use. Over the years I had heavily moded it to tune and enhance the features etc. With the recent release of Smoothwall 3.0 I figured it was time to get upgraded to the latest and greatest to see what improvements we might get.

I was not disappointed by the upgrade. First off in typical form for the Smoothwall community, they make it incredibly easy to download and install on to your system. The initial install went smoothly and in about 30 min I had the new firewall up and running. I simply burned the CD iso using my mac and rebooted the firewall to boot from the CD and start the install.

Once the main install was done the configuration started…

First was the DHCP scope configuration

Next came the static DHCP configs for my internal systems

One of the things that smoothwall 3.0 is missing is a hack to allow name resolution of your static DHCP entries. There was a hack for 2.0 to do this, but none for 3.0, so I took an adapted the 2.0 fix over to 3.0 code. This allows you to have full dnsmasq support for the static DHCP entries.

I added some custom mods from the smoothwall comunity including, mod commander, AdZapper, DHCP Lease viewer, Performance Graphs, SMART for SWE, Uptimed for SWE.

Then some final config of the various settings, turning on transparent web caching, enable Quality of Service priority settings, enable admin via SSH.

Overall Smoothwall 3.0 Express seems faster than 2.0, has some neat features like the web cache and QOS support and is the latest and greatest offering for an easy to use, extensible, community supported firewall for home or small business use.