General Questions

Hello, Im new to m0n0wall and pretty confused as to whats going on so let me explain my situation


I had a old 1.5ghz computer sitting in my closet and decided to try to make it into a router.. Rreason being is my old router would crash all the time (mainly when i ran bittorrent) and would bring web surfing to a crawl on other computers in my house.. So i setup m0n0wall, things worked fine. Worked for about 4 days, then one night i woke up my internet was going extremely slow, figured i would restart my modem.

I did that then i couldnt get m0n0wall to obtain an ip form my modem.. Thought maybe my isp was down called them they said no problems in my area ect... So I decided to hook my modem straight up to my computer and it worked, then decided to hook my old router back up and it worked... Tried m0nowall once agan and it did not work...

It assigns IPs to my networked computers just fine, all computers can axx the m0n0wall server, but the server will not get a ip or anything from the modem..... anyway I have no idea what might have happened what I did wrong, what could be wrong, what I should check ect So if anyone has any suggestions at all, If i forgot any information please let me know... 

ping google.com from the gui , if it pings then the server can see internet and if u r enabling captive portal just diable it and then enable it , the net will work after pinging and doing that

m0n0wall is a little tricky sometimes I had a similar problem, under system go to interfaces and tell it to release the wan ip and then renew it should work, you may have to do it twice, if not restart your cable modem and m0n0wall.

It happens every now and then the power goes out or something then it wont work for hours... I try everything... Restart m0n0 and modem still nothing... release and renew several times still nothing... unplug Ethernet cables plug them back in still nothing.. I plug my modem into my computer i get a ip right away.. then if i just leave everything hooked up to m0n0 it eventually works but takes hours to get an ip again.. sigh wish i could figure out why it does that

I had a lot of problems with m0n0wall when I was using an older machine. It just didn't seem to like the hardware in the machine! Sometimes it would shut down because of a power outage... but then it would not boot back up all the way. Like it would just pause in the middle of booting up. I would usually end up switching to a beta version, re-burning the CD (I used the bootable cd back then), formatting a new floppy, etc.. just to get it running again because that's all that seemed to work. And then I would have to re-do all my settings. Too much of a hassle to get it working again.

Even 1 time I had a huge problem with the mac spoofing. I would change the MAC address on my WAN interface through m0n0wall, and the internet would cut out (even though spoofing worked fine on my linksys) and not come back even if I cleared the spoofed mac. I had to clear out the spoofed mac AND reboot to get it working again. Sometimes, even re-doing all my settings.

But since then I've switched machines completely to newer hardware, network cards and all, and I have never had these problems! And nowadays I am using the generic-pc version (on a hard drive instead of a bootable cd). Much faster, and works great. Don't know why I was using the bootable cd/floppy combo before... I was just too lazy to read how to get the hard drive working.

Anyways sorry to go off, but basically when I had these problems it was definitely hardware related (probably the network cards), and switching to a newer machine has been great. If you have an another old machine laying around you could try it, but my guess would be incompatible hardware, or just old/quirky hardware. Sorry I cant give a definitive answer