Smoothwall Express 3 home setup

[Sephiroth]

Hi, I find myself a little stuck here. I'm trying to get my home network to sit behind a firewall/router.

 

I have a VMWare host server with 4 NICs, currently set up with NIC 0 on LAN for all VMs and a LAN switch and NIC 3 on WAN of the Smoothwall VM. The WAN port connects to a BT Homehub 4 through which we get internet access.

 

My PC should take the following route: PC NIC -> LAN Switch -> VMHost NIC 0 -> Smoothwall VM -> VMHost NIC 3 -> BT Homehub 4 -> Internet

 

Unfortunately it's not working

 

I have set the interfaces as 172.16.***.***/24 on green and DHCP on red (Homehub is a DHCP server). In theory this lets me get out to the web from green, through the Smoothwall box. However I can't get any further than the Homehub. I can ping Google from the smoothwall web interface, and can traceroute as far as the 7th step (131.55.163.*) but after that I just get asterisks. Also in this screen I get the error '31.55.163.* (reverse lookup failed)' for both ping and traceroute.

 

I have tried changing the DNS servers to googles by setting a static address on the red interface, but same problem.

 

Connecting direct to the homehub has always worked and still does.

 

Anyone with some Smoothwall knowledge able to help on this?

[FN-GM]

Have you enabled the transparent proxy on Smoothwall?

 

To be honest i would look at something else like PFsense. Smoothwall Express development seems to have stopped unfortunately.

[Sephiroth]

That was a faster response than I was expecting!

 

I'l have a look at PFSense then. I didn't realise that development had stopped. Thanks

[computer_expert]

Development hasn't stopped as such (there are release candidate versions of SWE 3.1 available). If you still want to use smoothwall, check your default security level and make sure that it is either half-open or open otherwise all outgoing traffic will be blocked.

 

However, I echo (ha!) @FN-GM 's comment about pfSense. I moved from SW to pfSense about 4yrs ago and have not looked back since.

Edited August 25, 2014 by computer_expert

[Sephiroth]

I am now up and running on pfSense (after some fun with DNS forwarders... My DC was being a )! Thanks for the help, I'd have spent hours trying to diagnose that one.

[FN-GM]

Also with PFSense you get much more such as natting etc.

[Sephiroth]

Yeah, I had spotted that. I wasn't expecting anywhere near as many features. But then, i was thinking of Smoothwall, where all the features like that are in their paid versions.