Finally! We have a network!

  • Posted by Shellie
  • Monday, July 2, 2007

Do you remember when you were this small? Did you work for your church then? It amazes me how much we have been able to grow and change over the past year! I’m beyond excited about this. I’m not sure why, it’s really not that complicated. But I’ve never set up anything like this before.

If you recall a few post back I was trying to use IPCop for this project. When that didn’t work out, I went back to the drawing board. I discovered that the issue I was having was related to the network cards I was trying to use. Nonetheless, I came across m0n0wall and I really like the options I have with it better. Sure, IPCop has a different feature set and more extensibility, but m0n0wall seemed like the better option for us.

Also, big thanks to Barry who pointed me to ZoneCD. It worked out perfectly for what I wanted to do with our wireless.

One final note of interest is that we are using the ScrubIT DNS servers for the open wireless, but not the LAN(s).

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July 2nd, 2007
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Dave Mast
Posted on:
Monday, July 2, 2007 at 9:50 pm

Lookin’ pretty good! Ours isn’t much more complicated than this, just maybe more copper and j-hooks in the ceiling. ;-)

If you like m0n0wall, you should give pfSense a try . It’s a takeoff of m0n0, with a few extra features.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Bob
Posted on:
Tuesday, July 3, 2007 at 7:22 am

Shellie, you da’ man! You have done more for the technology of NMCC than I could ever imagine! Thanks for giving us the tools to continue meeting needs and introducing people to Jesus!

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Shellie
Posted on:
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 7:08 am

This picture was very general for the website purposes. I’m going to beef it up with a little more useful information for actual reference.

I looked and pfSense, but almost all the documentation referenced m0n0wall, and I never could figure out what pfSense would do for me that m0n0wall couldn’t. I do think I’m going to play with it a little when I have some downtime.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Barry Buchanan
Posted on:
Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 9:55 am

I’m glad it worked out for you. It sounds like you took my suggestion a step further even with scrubIT. I really my install of ZoneCD since it runs headless I can stow it anywhere and just reboot it when it gets flaky, which happens about every 2 weeks to me but I think it is my wireless router more than the PC I’m using. We eventually will get an enterprise wireless system here, but in the mean time this was a fun solution. Best of all it is open source and I used all spare parts, so I spent nothing but my time doing mine. Have fun, thanks for the acknowledgement in your post too!

BarryB

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Chris Buechler
Posted on:
Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 1:03 pm

If m0n0wall meets your needs, it’s a great solution. If you find you need additional capabilities, pfsense may be a better fit. Either/or is drastically better than IPcop, IMO (why I started using and contributing to m0n0wall years ago, and why I’m one of the founders of pfsense). It would be worth playing with it at some point in the future when time permits. That’s the best way to see the differences at the moment. The documentation is not good right now, but we’re working on it.

pfSense is headquartered just up the road from you, in Louisville. Happened to find this post from one of my Google Alerts. :)

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Shellie
Posted on:
Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 7:41 pm

Wow! That is amazing. Gotta LOVE the internet. Thanks for the comment! How about a personal guided tour of what pfSense can do for me? :) I love a good reason to go the ‘ville! Stonybrook is the best theater ever. I’m a big movie guy, and I’m picky about my theaters.

Another reason why I didn’t pick something more feature rich is because I’m typically not smart enough to figure out all the extras. I think open source software in general assumes its users are already savvy about what they are trying to do or what they want to do.

and I’m not. :)

Two months ago, when I started this project, I had no idea what I was looking for in a wireless solution is a transparent proxy. Even now, I’m assuming that’s what I wanted.

I know m0n0wall has some capability there, so I probably could find a way to do this network without ZoneCD.

Someday…

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Shellie
Posted on:
Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 7:51 pm

By the way, Chris…

Great job on the m0n0wall documentation! Another reason why I preferred m0n0 over IPCop is I felt like I had a much better idea of what I could do (and how I could do it) with m0n0 just from reading.