Installation

A while back a friend and I decided that we would try and build some homemade firewall/router boxes out of some old PCs.  My first attempt at this was with Fedora Core 4 which I could never get to work properly so I decided to try M0n0wall. 

m0n0wall seems like the perfect solution, but I don't understand how I'm supposed to get it to work.  I tried loading the CD-ROM into my old machine and it reads fine.  I can assign the NICs to LAN and WAN but then it wants to reboot and it doesn't seem like it's saving these changes.  What I want to know is how I'm supposed to install m0n0wall onto the IDE hard dive in the PC and then configure it.

I do not currently have a switch.  I do however have a D-Link 524 wireless router, and I do believe that can be configured into a switch.

Does anyone have any suggestions or can tell me what I need to do?

It uses a floppy drive/disk to store configuration data, plug one in and pop in a formatted disk and you should be good to go.

As for your router, disable its DHCP server, give it a static LAN IP, then plug one of its LAN ports into the m0n0wall LAN port, if your router's ports/m0n0 LAN NIC don't auto-sense, you may need a crossover cable.

To install to a hard drive, read 3.2.2.
http://doc.m0n0.ch/handbook/setup-installing.html

Thank you very much.  I used a floppy disk and saved my settings.  I'm forced to use floppy however, the 3GB hard drive in the machine turned out to be bad, but no big deal in the end.  As for my D-Link, it just wants to have a fit when I try and configure it.  I think it's starting to go bad because it ocassionaly wants to reset itself.  So, I went ahead and bough an SMC 8 port Gigabit switch and currently using the D-Link wireless router as an access point. 

One thing I noticed in the WebGUI was that it supports some kind of wireless feature.  If I have a PCI Wireless NIC, does that mean I can configure monowall to be a wireless access point as well?

Thanks for all your help.

One thing I noticed in the WebGUI was that it supports some kind of wireless feature.  If I have a PCI Wireless NIC, does that mean I can configure monowall to be a wireless access point as well?

Yes, if you have a supported card. If you're running 1.2x, the supported cards are very minimal, and 802.11b only. If you run 1.3x beta there are a lot more options.

That's interesting info, thanks a lot.  I may have to look into getting a wireless card if/when the software  starts suppoting 802.11g.