m0n0wall Image download and installation
m0n0wall Admin Screen
m0n0wall administrative screen
(click to enlarge)
Lets get started:.
If you need some background information about firewalls, and routers, I would suggest searching the web for information about firewalls, there are many great articles covering everything from the basics to much more advanced topics. If you are already comfortable with the concept of firewalls and routers, GREAT,lets move along!
So you've decided to use a Netvista as a firewall running m0n0wall, there are just a few steps you will need to complete to get it up and running. They are shown below, and we'll get to them in a minute. But first, a little preface. This article will detail the steps to install the latest m0n0wall generic PC image to a Compact Flash (CF) card, Install the necessary network interface cards, and configure the initial browser based access to your new firewall/router. There is very good community support for m0n0wall available from the m0n0wall mailing lists, and FAQ documents, so I will not try to duplicate those documents here. This page is intended to get you past the initial installation and setup, and to cover the Netvista specific issues. That being said, lets move on...
Here are the steps you will need to complete to press your Netvista into service as a firewall:
Download CF image:.
The first step in getting your m0n0wall up and running is to download the latest generic pc image
from the m0n0wall home page. There are several other images
on the m0n0wall download page, but the one you want is called generic-pc-x.x.img, with the x's being replaced with the latest version numbers.
As of this writing the latest / greatest is version 1.2.
Here's a link to the list of mirrors.
As always choose a mirror site that is geographically close to you to conserve bandwidth.
Save the img file somewhere readily accessible on your local PC, I recommend saving the img file to your desktop for simplicity later on.
Under Linux, save the file in your home directory, or some other easily accessible location.
Now its time to get the m0n0wall image over to the CF card.
Write image to CF card:.
If you want to check out the m0n0wall installation page for installation instructions, go here.
Newbies may find it too brief and vague. Thats why this page exists.
You should pay special attention during these steps, because if you make a wrong choice here, you could completely overwrite your PCs hard drive. Of course
I cannot assume any liability for damage you caused by using the software mentioned, or following any of the procedures that worked for me. So proceed
only if you are sure you know how to prevent those nasty things from happening.
Hopefully you have secured a compatible USB card reader, and are familiar with how to attach it to your PC
and insert the CF card correctly. These come in many designs, but basically you should just have to plug the USB connector into any available USB port,
and then insert the CF card into the slot on the reader.
Writing the image under Windows:
If you're going to use Windows to write the image to the CF card, you must first download and install a utility that allows direct access to the card. The
utility program can be found on the m0n0wall installation page, and is called "physdiskwrite".
Save the zip file to any suitable location, and then unzip it. For ease of use, I unzip the program to my desktop. That way it will be ready to roll when its time to
write the image to the CF card.
Before you plug the card reader in, we need to identify the disk drive (associated with the CF card) that we will be putting the image on. Here's the dangerous part,
so please pay attention and make sure you understand before continuing. The easiest way that I have found is to leave the card reader unplugged and drag the
m0n0wall image file you downloaded above to the physdiskwrite icon. Windows
will open a command window, showing the disks that it has identified. You may see disks 0 through 3 or more depending on how many drives are in your system
and whether or not you have any other removable drives installed or attached. Make note of the current configuration, and close the command window by
clicking on the X in the top right corner. Now, plug in your CF reader, and insert the CF card into it. Wait a few seconds for Windows to catch up, and then
drag the m0n0wall image file to the physdiskwrite icon again. Now you will see a new disk identified. See this screenshot for
examples of before and after if you need help understanding what you are looking for. Once that you're POSITIVE that you know the drive you want to put
the image on, enter the drive number into the command window and press [enter]. You will be asked to confirm you choice, This is your last chance to back out, so
press"y" after you've stopped and thought about your choices. After 5~10 seconds the window will close, and you will now have a shiny new
m0n0wall image on your CF card. Linux directions are below, so you can skip ahead to the Installing NICs and CF card step.
Writing the image under Linux:
Once you're booted into Linux, login as root, and get to a command prompt, we will need to be root to use the fdisk program. Linux sees USB memory cards as SCSI disks, so before plugging in the CF card reader we want to
verify any disks that may be already identified. Most PCs have IDE disks identified as /dev/hdx where the x is 0-3, so on most machines you will not see any disks
identified as SCSI disks until you plug in your card reader and CF card.
Now, from the command prompt, lets see if there are already any SCSI drives identified. Enter "fdisk /dev/sda" and press [enter]. If you receive a message of
"Unable to open /dev/sda7" then there is not a drive identified as /dev/sda. If instead you see a disk message about disk cylinders, booting, and a command prompt that
says "Command (m for help):" then there is a disk already identified as /dev/sda. In that case, simply press "q" to quit without changing the partition table.
Continue to use the fdisk command replacing the "a" with b,c and d (/dev/sda to /dev/sdd), making notes of any drives already identified, and their identifier(sda, sdb etc).
Now, plug in your CF reader, insert the CF card into it, and wait a few seconds. Then repeat the "fdisk /dev/sda" through "fdisk /dev/sdd" process. You
should now see a disk identified where it was not before. Make note of this drive designation.
Now that we know our CF cards disk identifier (lets say /dev/sda in this example), lets write the image to the card. The image is compressed, so it needs to be uncompressed, and then written to the appropriate disk. This is done with the following command:
Where xxx is the m0n0wall version you downloaded, and /dev/sdx is the SCSI device name of your CF card (/dev/sda in our example)
After a few seconds, this will complete with a message of:
18208+1 records out
Plus a warning about trailing garbage, which you can safely ignore . It's because of the digital signature. The image is now safely tucked away on the CF card and is ready to boot and configure.
On to hardware installation:.
Now that you've written the image to the CF card, lets move on to the next step, Installing NICs and CF card.
