M0n0wall is a terrific firewall setup. It is a highly recommended replacement for netgear or Linksys routers with their proprietary/esoteric interfaces. M0n0wall has an easy to use web interface with concise help on how to program its various settings. Recently, however, I experienced an interesting problem.
M0n0wall is built to work on a dual nic embedded device. M0n0wall comes standard with a number of fabulous utilities (from m0n0wall features):
- wireless support (access point with PRISM-II/2.5/3 cards, BSS/IBSS with other cards including Cisco)
- captive portal
- 802.1Q VLAN support
- stateful packet filtering
- block/pass rules
- logging
- NAT/PAT (including 1:1)
- DHCP client, PPPoE, PPTP and Telstra BigPond Cable support on the WAN interface
- IPsec VPN tunnels (IKE; with support for hardware crypto cards, mobile clients and certificates)
- PPTP VPN (with RADIUS server support)
- static routes
- DHCP server and relay
- caching DNS forwarder
- DynDNS client and RFC 2136 DNS updater
- SNMP agent
- traffic shaper
- SVG-based traffic grapher
- firmware upgrade through the web browser
- Wake on LAN client
- configuration backup/restore
- host/network aliases
Sounds great, but where do I get one? You may roll your own embedded system or purchase one from a few different vendors. Logic Supply is a great place to purchase a m0n0wall systems pre-configured for use. They feature mini-ITX systems. Their physical and electrical footprint is very small. You can find their m0n0wall systems here below, where the cheapest is around $300.00:
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