Ode to M0n0wall

About half a year ago I bought an Alix 2C3 embedded system board. It’s got a 500 MHz Geode CPU, 256 MB of RAM, a mini-PCI slot (for a wireless card), 3 network interfaces, and a compact flash slot (CF-card as hard drive). It’s running m0n0wall, a free FreeBSD-based firewall software and is essentially the entry point into my home network. I had looked at other alternatives such as pfsense, yet I found m0n0wall convincingly simple and to the point. And it boots up fast from a 256M flash card.

I used to rely on a Linux box to provide my basic network needs like DHCP and DNS and every time I rebooted the box my network stopped working. This little dedicated box is not running all of it. With the three network interfaces I created LAN, DMZ, and WAN zones. The LAN is hooked up to my Linux server and wireless (for the iMac and laptops), the DMZ is connected to a virtual machine on the Linux server which is basically my public-facing web server (Ubuntu!). The WAN is directly hooked up to the cable modem.

Let’s look at some of the features that have led me come to adore m0n0wall:

• Web-based admin interface with user management capabilities
• DNS relay
• DHCP Server (much more configurable than a standard wireless router)
• Firewall and NAT rules (stateful packet filtering)
• Traffic Shaper (which I use to throttle the traffic on my public web server)
• VPN (PPTP and IPSec) - I just love VPN-ing in to my home network from work
• Logs, debugging support, and live traffic graphs
• Dynamic DNS integration (e.g. with DynDNS in my case)

Here are some fun screenshots:

Intro Screen

Firewall Configuration

Traffic Graph

Related Links: M0n0wall | Alix Boards | M0n0wall traffic shapping

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