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Turn your old pc into a power router! 
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King
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Post Turn your old pc into a power router!
I mainly needed to do this for work so I tested it out at home first. My D-Link router at home was also reseting itself alot lately so I needed a new router. I have a old Dell P3 700mhz 128mb ram pc sitting here I used. There where 2 programs Im going to test.

IP Cop and Monowall

I tried IPcop first. Set up would have went A LOT faster had I had the correct network cables plugged into the right spots.

First you download ipcop, the ISO, to your computer and burn it to a CD using a burner program that burns ISO's.

Then load up the CD in your old computer and boot from it.

Just follow the directions. Its pretty straight forward.

To get my NIC to pull a DHCP address from the cable modem I had to reset the cable modem. I used my old router as a switch as well. I just unplugged the WAN and left all my LAN connections in. Have one of your LAN cables going from your switch to your router box.

Hes some feature of IPcop.

Quote:
#

A secure, stable and highly configurable Linux based firewall
#

Easy administration through the built in web server
#

A DHCP client that allows IPCop to, optionally, obtain its IP address from your ISP
#

A DHCP server that can help configure machines on your internal network
#

A caching DNS proxy, to help speed up Domain Name queries
#

A web caching proxy, to speed up web access
#

An intrusion detection system to detect external attacks on your network
#

The ability to partition your network into a GREEN, safe, network protected from the Internet, a BLUE network for your wireless LAN and a DMZ or ORANGE network containing publicly accessible servers, partially protected from the Internet
#

A VPN faclity that allows you to connect your internal network to another network across the Internet, forming a single logical network or to securely connect PCs on your BLUE, wireless, network to the wired GREEN network
#

Traffic shaping capabilities to give highest priority to interactive services such as ssh and telnet, high priority to web browsing, and lower priority to bulk services such as FTP.
#

Improved VPN support with x509 certificates.
#

Built from the ground up with ProPolice to prevent stack smashing attacks in all applications.
#

A choice of four kernel configurations, allowing you to choose an optimum configuration for your circumstances.


I must say its a nice setup. It will work really great for work because I can montior traffic. Web surfing is also faster.

Next Ill try Monowall and Ill give you an update. If anyone is wanting to try this Ill be glad to give you a hand setting up. [/quote]

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Fri Jun 09, 2006 9:44 pm
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Minor Diety
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Good stuff.

Is it possible to turn a laptop into wireless router? If so, i might save some money here. (Instead of buying a wireless router+2 adaptors, i buy 1 transmitter+2 adaptor.)? Dont really know how it works.

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Sat Jun 10, 2006 5:12 am
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King
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yes.

Your going to need to buy a wireless rotuer or a wireless access point regardless. The laptop can be the router but you would still need to plug in the access point or wireless router to get a single. You cant turn the laptop into the device that produces the wireless signal.

Make sense?

It would look like this

Yes
[laptop](router) -> [wireless router or access point] -> PC

No
[router] -> [laptop](wireless access point) -> PC

Make sense?

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Sat Jun 10, 2006 6:00 am
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Felix Rex
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if you ran an ad hoc wireless network, you could get away without a WAP. Ad hoc just lets all the nodes talk directly to each other... and as long as you put the node with the network connection as your default gateway and have it properly routing and acting as NAT point, it should work that way too.

I'm taking a Cisco wireless course right now. :p

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Sat Jun 10, 2006 10:10 am
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K, so its not so much a savings benefit, but a gain in performance.

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Sat Jun 10, 2006 3:26 pm
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King
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derf wrote:
K, so its not so much a savings benefit, but a gain in performance.


Yea. Normally I have music streaming and Im gaming or something. Some games like BF2 that hog everything including bandwidth shut down my old Dlink router.

Plus I do have to admit, websurfing is faster. Really it seems everything network wise got a little bit faster.

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Sat Jun 10, 2006 8:40 pm
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King
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*UPDATE*

Ok after much researching and testing I found Monowall to be very efficient and fast compared to IPCOP. Monowall using FreeBSD vs IPCop using linux.

After doing some searching about monowall I found what I have been looking for, pfsense.

Pfsense is written by the same guy that made monowall only it specifically for PC's. Monowall was designed mainly for embedded hardware not PC's. PFsense take advantage of PC based hardware and even comes with packages like squid proxy.

Pfsense is in Beta 4 right now. I tested it at home and I just installed it for our office at work and I got to tell you its nice. Way faster routing than our little old Netgear rp614.

So if you have an old pc and want a very nice router then I suggest pfsense.

pfsense features

Quote:
*
FreeBSD 6.1 - CURRENT with ALTQ
*
Wireless a/b/g wpa_supplicant, turbo and _MUCH_ more
* Incoming load balancing pools
*
PPPoE Server
*
Themes
*
New system->afterfilterchangeshellcmd xml tag which is executed on the system after each filter change (or other networking related changes)
* All of the GREAT m0n0wall features, some improved
*
setup wizard using xml -> web gui toolkit
*
package xml -> web gui toolkit. RAPIDLY create packages and GUI's
*
rebootless changes of settings
*
multiple WAN Support
*
outgoing load balancing pool
*
pf (openbsd's packet filter)
*
CARP - for failover and clustersyncing (rules, trafficshaper, nat, IPSEC SAs...)
*
failovercapable DHCP-Server with advanced settings (specify gateway, DNS, WINS)
* advanced support for wireless devices (including WEP, WPA, HostAP-mode, hardware-encryption if supported by driver, mac-filtering, hide SSID, ...) with by freeBSD6 supported wirless devices (atheros recommended for full functionality)
*
Systemstatus with realtimegraphs including SWAP usage monitor
*
ALTQ traffic shaping with integrated magic shaper wizard
*
Queuegraphs for Trafficshaper
*
Edit file option
*
Execute command now in menu
*
SSH Support
*
Console support on COM1
*
FTP-Proxy
*
enhanced ALIAS-system
*
enhanced configuration-system featuring a configuration history and partial config down-/uploads
* a lot of small "helpers" that make admins life easier
*
Packages!
o
ifdepd - building interface-dependencies
o
ifstated - connection-checking
o
pfflowd - converting PF-status-massages to Cisco NetFlow-Datagrams
o
PFStat - Graphing
o
NTOP - Enhanced network history data
o
STunnel - wrap standard ports with SSL
o
Pure-FTPD - Host FTP files
o
Squid Transparent Proxy
o
arpwatch - watch ethernet/ip-adress-pairings
o
assp - Anti-Spam-Proxy
o
doorman - portknocking to temporarily open ports
o
freeradius - Radiusserver
o mtr - enhanced traceroute
o
nmap - networkscanner for security auditing
o
siproxd - proxy/masquerading for SIP-protocol
o
spamd - fake SMTP-Server as Spam-Tarpit
o
iperf - bandwidth-measuring
o
netio - bandwidth-measuring

(some of the linked screenshots are not up to date as this is work in progress)

m0n0wall base features

*
web interface (supports SSL)
*
serial console interface for recovery
o
set LAN IP address
o
reset password
o
restore factory defaults
o
reboot system
*
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 and mobile clients)
*
PPTP VPN (with RADIUS server support)
*
static routes
*
DHCP server
*
caching DNS forwarder
*
DynDNS client
*
SNMP agent
*
traffic shaper
*
SVG-based traffic grapher
*
firmware upgrade through the web browser
*
Wake on LAN client
*
configuration backup/restore
*
host/network aliases

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Thu Jun 15, 2006 7:57 am
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Minor Diety
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Imho, if i don't understand half of the words used, it should be in General Technical Forum :P

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Fri Jun 16, 2006 4:52 am
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