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Topic: Using Smoothwall UTM hardware  (Read 3046 times)
« on: June 21, 2013, 11:55:56 »
peteispo *
Posts: 8

I currently have a Smoothwall UTM-100 rack-mount box, the licence on which is about to expire.
Rather than paying siginifcant money to renew the licence, I wondered whether I could put something less expensive on it instead, like m0n0?
I have not yet looked into how I might persuade it to boot anything other than what is currently there, but thought I'd ask on this forum to see if anyone else had tried...
« Reply #1 on: June 21, 2013, 16:13:12 »
Fred Grayson *****
Posts: 994

Without any technical description of the hardware (CPU, NICs, memory, I/O, etc.) it's not possible to suggest things beyond substituting the original boot media with one with m0n0wall and just see what happens.


--
Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle.
« Reply #2 on: June 21, 2013, 22:21:41 »
Lee Sharp *****
Posts: 517

It looks like the hardware may work, but configuration may be a chalange...  It is a Celeron processor, so it will run.  But I can not tell if the console is VGA or serial, so I am not sure what image you may need.  And as stated, I would write the image to some other media, and boot that, not overwrite what you have now.
« Reply #3 on: June 26, 2013, 17:50:22 »
peteispo *
Posts: 8

I like the "try it and see approach" - it's done me well in the past. Just wondered whether anyone had any know gotchas.
I think the plan now is actually to buy a m0n0wall appliance instead, since it's about the same price as the annual licence renewal on Smoothwall...
If that plan goes ahead, I can play with the Smoothwall box and maybe put something back into this forum if I get a result.
Thanks for your responses
« Reply #4 on: July 10, 2013, 16:10:18 »
peteispo *
Posts: 8

Well, I've tried it and seen...
Firstly, the Smoothwall UTM-100 box I have has a CF card slot on the motherboard, and a PCI slot in the back: not sure if they are standard... There's no on-board video but there is a serial and two USB ports.
So, once I broke the seal on the case screws and took the top off, I added a PCI video card, partly because I couldn't lay my hands on a convenient machine with a serial port to connect to the console. I plugged in a USB keyboard too.
I wrote the generic-pc.1.34.img to the CF card on my Linux desktop using the instructions, and slotted the CF into the motherboard.
Then I switched on and hacked the BIOS: I needed to enable booting from "Other Device" and re-order the boot priority to get the CF to be the one to boot.
Looked good to start with... but then I got a fatal error about not being able to find the "config.xml". Obviously there's something about the CF card slot that isn't supported in the m0n0 kernel.
So I tried something else: I uncompressed the generic-pc image onto a USB flash drive as a file (rather than writing to the device itself), and then downloaded a SliTaz-base image (http://mirror.slitaz.org/iso/3.0/flavors/slitaz-3.0-base.iso) which I wrote to the CF card instead.
SliTaz booted up nicely from the CF, and that gave me a Linux command line from which I could mount the USB flash drive. Then I wrote the unpacked pc-generic image from the USB drive to the SATA drive (/dev/sda) with dd, shut down, and unplugged the CF and USB drive.
When I restarted the machine this time, it found the m0n0 installation nicely on the hard drive, and took me to the configuration menu, where I could set up the four network ports.

So, the sequence seems to be:
  • Get a CF card with SliTaz-base on it (or some other super-minimal Linux - note that the limited number of USB ports might preclude using a mouse as well as a keyboard...)
  • Copy the generic-pc image (unpacked - I didn't want to assume that SliTaz had gzip) to a USB drive as a file.
  • Find an old PCI video card and USB keyboard.
  • Open the case and put in the video card and CF card. Insert the USB drive and keyboard.
  • Switch on the box and fix the BIOS settings to get it to boot SliTaz from the CF card.
  • Use the SliTaz command prompt to work out which /dev files are the USB and the hard drive: listing by /dev/disk/by-path helped there.
  • Mount the flash drive as (say) /media/usbflash, then dd the image file from there to the root device of the hard drive.
Code:
# mount /dev/sdb1 /media/usbflash
# dd if=pc-generic-unzipped.img of=/dev/sda
  • Restart, remembering to take out the CF card and USB drive while the machine is down.
« Reply #5 on: July 10, 2013, 20:06:10 »
Lee Sharp *****
Posts: 517

You could also just hook the SATA drive up to a desktop and use dd (linux) or physdiskwrite (Windows) to burn to the disk, and then put it back.  But yes, you will still need a video card and keyboard to config it.

Glad you got it working!  Another source of m0n0wall!
« Reply #6 on: July 11, 2013, 09:10:17 »
peteispo *
Posts: 8

Experimenting with SliTaz gave me another tool in my armoury, and when I saw the CF slot I really couldn't resist the chance to use one of my crufty old CF cards!
The SliTaz boot also gave me one other step that I didn't mention: I used dd to back up an image of the original Smoothwall install from the hard disk to a safe place on the network. I could have done that from a PC too, but where's the fun in that?
 
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