On Sunday 17 June 2007, Mike Chambers wrote: >On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 05:01 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: >> I liked portsentry. Between that, iptables and tcpwrappers, nothing got >> past an old rh7.3 box I used for a firewall for 5 or 6 years. The logs >> said many thousands tried though. But even that was cut back by 99.9% >> when I got dsl, found roaring penguins PPPoE was crap and bought a linksys >> BEFSR41 router. It then stopped the huge majority of that crap. Now I'm >> using dd-wrt on another old box to replace both of those boxes, and its >> just as bulletproof & uses 300 watts less power... > >I too used to use portsentry when I was using my linux server as a >router/firewall as well as it's other duties. But like you, I found the >linksys routers and started using those and have since. > >But what are you referring to with the dd-wrt? Open source program to >replace the linksys program in the router (I have read briefly on this >in the past)? Something else? (some reason, I feel like an idiot right >now hehe) > That is now available, and has been for nearly a year, in whats called x86 builds, goto dd-wrt.com find downloads, beta, x86 builds. There or thereabouts, you'll find free and registered separate trees. For starters, get the public-vga version so it will run a monitor tied to that box. I had one, but it died of old age, no synch the last time I powered it up but you might want to do that while getting it started. Take an old box, I used one that had a 500mhz-k6-III in it, 256 megs of memory (that's way overkill, 32 will work as well I believe, strip the drives out, put a $3.00 cf card adaptor on the end of the ide0 cable, put 2 nics in it and pick up a universal usb based card reader for about $30. The second nic can even be an older 10-base-t since that is faster than most dsl connections & thats the one that should face the dsl modem, and you may have to play slot dance with the cards to put the slow card as eth0 because the first one found is assumed to be the WAN port. Plug that card reader into your work box, and dd the dd-wrt_public_vga.image onto the smallest cf card you can buy, 128 megs probably. The image is about 11 megs. Then plug the cf into the ide adaptor and powerup that old box & let it boot from that cf card, which it thinks is a hard drive. You can ssh into it, or plug a monitor & keyboard in, but best is to use its web page which you'll find reasonably easy to use, just as in the linksys product. The registered version also supports atheros 802-11 cards, running them in parallel with eth1. I already had an 8 port netgear 100-base-t switch, and everything here is plugged into that with the dd-wrt box feeding a port on it. That thing however, seems to be a hub as I can tcpdump any address connected to it. If it was a true switch, I shouldn't be able to do that. But it hooks up my neighborhood, including an airborn hunk of cat5 strung to my shop building where an install of emc2 on a kubuntu-6.06 runs my milling machine. Gotta have web access on a milling machine you know, particularly when the software that runs it has at least one and often 3 or 4, of the softwares developers attending the #emc channel on freenode. I've had problems, told them on irc, and had a fixed version in cvs in 10 minutes a couple of times, and a new version downloadable via adept the next day. This is how software should be written. But that's not dd-wrt. Sebastion (BrainSlayer) is pretty helpfull too with dd-wrt problems. My lappies unwillingness to connect to the wifi card in the router was finally found, it took an "selinux=0" as a kernel argument in the lappies grub.conf to fix that, even in permissive mode, selinux was blocking it and doing it silently, nothing in any logs. I spent a week on that! Grrrr... dd-wrt. Best kept router secret around, Mike. >-- >Mike Chambers >Madisonville, KY > >"Best little town on Earth!" -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) It is better to wear out than to rust out.
