My Computers - Purgatorium

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Purgatorium


Ah, here's an interesting machine! 8-) Purgatorium is the gatekeeper of Skynet,. It is a dedicated firewall appliance, featuring IDS and a web proxy cache for the internal computers. It's based on an old left-over PC running
Smoothwall Express v2.0 rel 4. As I'm really a windows sysadmin nowadays, running linux (Smoothwall is based on Redhat Linux) is a first for me. After checking out the Smoothwall forums I've added a few "mods" to the firewall making it better. See below table. It turns out linux isn't that difficult... 8-]

Mod Link in the Smoothwall forums Comments
[2.0] Bandview PACK - view ipacsum, isp monthly cap monitor http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5393
For keeping tabs on the montly traffic for example. Allows one to set a montly traffic cap (for me it's 10GB/month).
[2.0] DShield Log Submission & Blocklist v.1.5.2 http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6351
Submits intrusion attempts on Purgatorium to the DShield-effort, and also downloads a preemptive IP-blocklist.
[2.0] lshw (hardware lister for smoothwall) like cpuid http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7577
Good-to-know-info.
[2.0] SmoothWall Information Display in GUI v.1.0 http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6158
Good-to-know-info.
[2.0] updatesnort PACK - one-click Snort rule updating http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5035
Updates the Snort-rules. Snort is the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) running on Purgatorium.
[2.0] Uptimed (uptime record keeping) v1.1 http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7559
Keeps an uptime record list.
[2.0] Web Proxy Log Analysis Reports http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2603
As it says.
[Mod] Smoothwall Port Forwarding Editing Change v.0.4.1 http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5884
A more "sane" editing mod for the port forwarding page.
Add DNS servers to Control page http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5696
Good-to-know-info.
Add Squid cache size to Advanced page http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5700&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
As it says.
Backing Up http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7052
A shell script for backing up all the Smoothie settings ans mods. Essential should the firewall ever go down.
Sort and Set Ranges of Blocked IPs (also SORT other stuff) http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3023
As it says.
beep beep http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2282&highlight=axel+tune
I have the Axel F-tune when Smoothie starts, and The Final Countdown when it's going down... 8-)
[2.0] Squid 2.5.STABLE6 http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8032&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
An update for the bundled Squid.
[2.0] Snort + Guardian - Reactive Firewall (v2.1) http://community.smoothwall.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8206
Awesome mod - kudos to the author(s)! The basics here is that when the IDS, ie Snort, detects an intrusion attempt, Guardian automagically adds the offending IP to the IP-block list. It is however unblocked after some time. In short it's a so-called Reactive Firewall! Elegant and slick, not to mention it's easy to install!

Old PC-Hardware
As I mentioned above Purgatorium runs of off some really ancient hardware... The good part is that it does this excellently! 8-)

Chassies Old AT-type mintower. Late '90s Scandic-model, for those living in Uppsala. 8-)
Hard Drives/Primary 1,5GB Seagate or possible Conner.
Floppy Drive 1x 1,44MB, Sony, Mitsumi, NEC or something (...).
CD Drives 1x CD-ROM 8x. Ancient and rather slow and noisy. Only used for installing Smoothwall and never since...
Motherboard Possibly an Asus, with Intel 430HX chipset (aka Triton II)
CPU Intel Pentium/133.
RAM 4x 64MB (256MB), EDO-RAM
Graphics/Primary S3 Trio32, PCI-type with 8MB on-board(!)
Graphics/Screen Running headless, so no monitor.
Keyboard BTC standard PS/2-type windows keyboard.
Network Interface/Green (internal) 3c900 Combo [Boomerang], 10Mbps PCI-type bus-mastered(!)
Network Interface/Red (external) 3c900 10BaseT [Boomerang], 10Mbps PCI-type bus-mastered(!)
Operating System/Primary Smoothwall Express v2.0 rel 4, based on Redhat Linux running the 2.4.27-kernel.


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