Setting up my Linux firewall

I have an old system from my mother-in-law, and decided that I wanted to set up a firewall with ADSL on one side, and an ethernet network on the other. Here is my detailed adventures. Note that this is a work in progress. I ain't there yet!

What I have

A Packard Bell of some sort. No manual, no name on the box. So I pop the case open and look for serial number looking stuff, and take it to the PB webpage. Turns out I have a PB 540 motherboard, 8 Mb ram, 120 Mhx pentium processor. Model is a Legend 74CDT Supreme (I think). I pop in some extra memory to get it up to 24 Mb. Digging around the website, and in Windoze, I get the following info together.

Specs :
 
Disk 2.39 Gb, CMD PCI-0640 wi/ PCI to IDE controller
CD-ROM NEC CD-ROM CDR-210P - SCSI interface (I found this later)
Sound card Media Vision ProAudio Spectrum 16/Plus/Studio and 16/Studio with SCSI
Video Cirrus Logic 076, 5430 PCI
Monitor Socos MA-1450 Non-interlaced
Modem COM1, Maxtech, XPV336I 33.6 modem IRC-4, Addr 3F8
ATI1 : 219 VF-1133HV/R9 V1.00.04
ATI3 : E.C. Version: T
ATI4 : Modem chip : Rockwell RCV288DPI
Ports UART NS 16550AN
Mouse PS/2

I picked up a copy of Caldera OL 2.2 at Best Buy for $30, which included a $10 rebate! So that's what I will install.

Preparing the disk partitions and initial install

I decided that I would max out the swap space (why not?), set up a decent partition for root stuff, and leave the majority of the space for a user partition.
 
/dev/hda1 200 Mb Everything but /home
/dev/hda2 128 Mb Swap
/dev/hda3 the rest /home

If I run short on space in the hda1 partition, I can always move some stuff over to the large partition and put in a softlink. In particular, I will probably do that for /opt
 

  • Install CD and run Lizard. Install products, create boot & modules diskettes, and LISA diskettes.
  • Reboot with CD in drive - go to bios to make CD bootable - no way, not an option.
  • Back up and start over.....
  • Turn off power management and boot with boot floppy in drive
  • Run partition magic to create partitions
  • reboot with CD and Install disks in drive.
  • System can't find CD drive. Sigh.
  • Back up and start over......
  • Put LISA boot disk in drive, boot up system
  • Use fips to set up /dev/hda1 and /dev/hda2 partitions
  • Work through the LISA menus
  • Install LILO


    • The big problem I had was that the CD drive couldn't be found. Finally I looked out on the internet and discovered that the silly thing had a SCSI interface. Once I knew that, and loaded the correct driver, everything went smoothly and I was able to proceed with the install.

    Getting X to work

    I had a problem with XF86Setup that never got resolved. If I tried to select which keyboard to use and hit the apply button, XF86Setup would segfault. So, after about 6 tries, I decided just to skip that step.

    I hadn't checked to see what sort of mouse I had, so I had to fool around for quite a while before I got it right. Turned out it was a PS/2 mouse hooked to /dev/psaux.

    I ran SuperProbe to find out about my video card.
    CL-G D5430/40 1024 Mb, 1152x900 @ 8 bpp, 800x600 @ 16 bpp
    so I used all those parameters to set up the video.

    Surfed the web some more to find out about the monitor, finally found that it is :
    1024x768, non-interlaced, multi-synch
    so I chose the non-interlaced option and everything worked just fine.

    So now I had X!

    Some Nagging Admin issues

    The admin tool in KDE is rather nice. Once X is running, I recommend making use of it.

    I got two warnings when booting up :

  • /dev/hda2 has insecure permissions 0660, 0600 suggested.
  • /usr/lib/kbd/keytables/us.map not found


    • For the second problem I found a file :
    /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us.map.gz
    which I copied to the desired place an unzipped.

    For the first I just changed them as root,
    chmod 600 /dev/hda2

    Mounting floppies

    Initially I couldn't mount a floppy, so I edited /etc/fstab to have these two lines :
    /def/fd0 /mnt/floppy ext2 defaults,noauto,user 0 0
    /dev/fd0 /mnt/dosfloppy msdos defaults,noauto,user 0 0

    Then I created the msdos mountpoint :
    mkdir /mnt/dosfloppy

    But I still couldn't mount a DOS floppy. So I went into the KDE module manager, and added the kernel modules fat (first) and then vfat.

    That fixed it!

    Set up last partition :

    I hadn't actually set up my big partition for /home, and I already had /home in the smaller one. I'll tell what I did, and what I should have done.

    From the KDE control center I got the size of the third partition as 2,161,152 blocks. So I typed :
    mkfs -v -t ext2 -c /dev/hda3 2161152
    which reformatted that partition and wiped it clean.

    Then I  typed :
    mount /dev/hda3 /home ext2 defaults
    and suddenly realized that I had just wiped out my user account. So I copied the 'dot' files from /root, and set it back up again. I should have copied the user files to a safe place, wiped /home, and copied them back.
     

    Fixing COAS install

    I tried running COAS to do admin stuff, and it failed with a message :
    coas : Unable to load ExtensionClass module

    I puttered around, and finally searched the net. That told me that ExtensionClass was part of Python. I searched the RPM Packages :
    for r in *.rpm
    do
        echo $r
        rpm -q lp $r | grep ExtensionClass
    done | less
    and found that it lived in python-eclass-1.2-0a.i386.rpm
    so I added that file in via
    rpm -i python-eclass-1.2-0a.i386.rpm
    and coas began to work just fine.

    While cruising the Caldera webpages, I noticed that it recommended an update to coas, so I downloaded it and applied it to my system.
    rpm -q coas && rpm -U coas-1.0-8.i386.rpm
     

    Let's try out the modem!

    How about Peer to Peer networking?

     

     


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