Smoothwall Express Error

[netadmin]

I am trying to install Smoothwall 2.0 express on VMWare.
I have been able to get it installed and can access the web interface.

However, when I try to use the server as a proxy server and access from a client, the following error message appears for any page on the Internet. Any ideas?

The computer has one physical nic. Right now, I have set VMWare up to use the Green interface only.

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://google.com/
The following error was encountered:
Unable to determine IP address from host name for google.com
The dnsserver returned:
Refused: The name server refuses to perform the specified operation.
This means that:
The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.
Your cache administrator is webmaster.

[contink]

Rather than try to use version 2.0 why not grab the vmware guest OS of the latest version 3.0.

It's likely to already be setup appropriately and work better in vmware

[netadmin]

OK. I installed the 3.0 VMWare image.
It runs much faster, but is still having the same error.

I'm guessing some network setting in either Smootwall or VMWare is incorrect.

Any thoughts?

[Ric_]

Is Smoothwall looking in the correct place for DNS?

[contink]

The computer has one physical nic. Right now, I have set VMWare up to use the Green interface only.

Will smoothwall work with a single NIC?

I would have thought at minimum you'd need to have two NICs... one for red and the other for green..

[netadmin]

I had forgotten to mention, that when I installed the new VMWare image, it defaulted to using two virtual network cards.

I have configured one network card to be a static IP (192.168.2.2). By typing this address in the browser, I can successfully access the web config pages for Smoothwall.

I have configured the other network card to be DHCP. My router registers this "computer" separately from my physical machine and gives it a valid IP address. When I set it to be DHCP, it removed the option to set DNS.

I was hoping that Smoothwall might be able to work with the two virtual network cards. Do you think this will work? Does anyone have any tips on reconfiguring the network cards?

If it helps, I also noticed that with the new version of Smoothwall, unless I have a remote proxy defined in the config, when I try to access a page (like Google), the browser takes about 30 seconds to load a Squid style error message. The error code is timeout.

Thanks for your help.

[tom_newton]

Express certainly should work ok on VMware; try the forums over at smoothwall.org. TBH sounds like you have a dns problem - can the smoothwall ping your ISP's DNS servers?

[codfather]

I have built the VMware images for the Smoothwall project, and if you go over to the community site you can get the new express 3 image from our site, the link is off the main page.

They work fine with a single NIC, this post is coming from behind such a VMware session now, but you could change the VMware settings to use multiple NIC's if you wanted without to much trouble. Basically you bridge the red SW NICs , and connect the Green NIC on a virtual internal network, which your host also uses. You can then use all of SW's proxies etc, and protect your machine. This does need a machine with plenty of RAM, and a good processor mind ;-)

If you need any help just post in my vmware post on the SW community site and I will help you fix it.

Cod

[tom_newton]

Alright codfather - nice to see you here

(for the rest of you: codfather is a SmoothWall express team member, and seriously knows his onions!)