General Questions

Hi there,
I discovered m0n0wall yesterday and I am very please with it. It seems to me that m0n0wall has a great potential. I am planning to use it to make bandwith test in a vmware virtual environment.
However, I am a bit confused since vmware website quotes 3 vmware appliances.

1 : m0n0wall appliance (1.2)
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/10
It seems that this appliance has been published by vmware itselft.

2 : x-m0n0wall (1.2)
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/150
This appliance has been put together by Hero Van Brugh (website : http://www.xs4all.nl/~brugh/projects.html)

3 : m0n0wall (1.2)
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/319
This appliance has been put together by Chris Buechler (website: http://chrisbuechler.com/m0n0wall/vmware/). This Appliance could be the same one as the first one.

4 : Googleing a bit, I found a another appliance in these forums build up by Jorge Mera:
http://m0n0.ch/wall/list/showmsg.php?id=305/26 (v. 1.3b2)

Which one is the best option?

In my experience, m0n0wall is indeed an excellent piece of software. I have been using it as a virtual router running on VMWare Server 1.0.1 on Ubuntu 6.06 for 6 months now without any issues! I am using the x-m0n0wall virtual appliance, but I never got heartbeat working, which is not a major issue. AFAIK the x-m0n0wall is the only one with vmware tools, vmxnet and heartbeat (supposedly) enabled.

It would be great, however, if somebody would create a VMWare appliance with the new monowall version and VMXnet + vmware tools + heartbeat working.

I am running vmware 1.0.2 on a Debian 3.1 R5 server.  Heart works fine on my server (I just have to wait for few seconds for the HB rate to clibe to 100%).

When I start the x-m0n0wall appliance I don't have any console output. The screen remains black in the vmware console. Do you have the same behavior ? Is it normal?

I can see and access the console without any problems through the VMWare Server console that I run on my Windows XP workstation. Try disabling encryption between server and console as a test.

Sincerely,

Mads

You probably want to run the 1.2 version, as to which, that's up to you. I don't know the other people who created m0n0wall appliances, mine's the only one created by anyone officially affiliated with the m0n0wall project (/me is Chris Buechler).

Though mine are out of date, you can upgrade them via the webGUI just like any other install. 

I had a version with vmxnet and heartbeat but it didn't work 100% properly. I haven't had time to mess with it, nor time to update the images I put out a while back with newer releases.

Just for info:

Brugh has created an updated appliance (v1.231) and posted it on the VMWare Appliances board - se link below, page 6 of the thread:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=43915

It has working vmware tools (heartbeat etc) and I've had it running for several weeks now with no issues. The threat also has info if you have trouble getting heartbeat to work.

exactly