Re: [OT] Smoothwall question

[kimble <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Miles wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience of smoothwall (or in other words, is
> there another linux based router that is better?)?  I am trying to
> it on a Compaq Proliant 850R that I managed to get hold of for a few
> bob...

It might be worth considering IPCop (http://www.ipcop.org/) - originally
based on smoothwall, but a totally open source project, as opposed to a
commercial project with a cut-down free version.  As such the developers
are much more open-minded to queries from users who want to do
non-standard things.  It also has some nifty features that the free
version of smoothwall lacks, which may or may not be relevant to you.

IPcop's installer works the same way, so you'll still have the same hard
drive issue, but it might be worth asking on the user and/or development
mailing list (https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipcop-user
and https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipcop-devel),
as there
have been related questions in the past (see the thread "disk with bad
blocks" in the ipcop-user archive).

Off the top of my head, you might be able to install your diagnostics
tool, then install ipcop/smoothwall on a spare drive, boot the machine
with a live-CD distro such as knoppix, manually create the partitions,
copy the files across and sort out the bootloader.  Or perhaps,
depending on how the diagnostics work, use a live-cd to resize one of
the partitions after the install (they allocate big partitions for log
and webproxy cache which will be almost empty immediately after install).


kim.