Hardware

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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?