theWall / News: Recent posts

I've received several messages recently asking if this project was dead or not. Here's the current status: my personal firewall has been up for 483 days which should give you an idea of when I last touched it. The last FreeBSD release that thewall built on successfully was 4.5. The ISC dhcp client was updated prior to the 4.6 release and it has not built cleanly as part of a "crunch" since. I removed the dhcp client to find out what other problems would pop up and eventually got thewall to build on 4.8R. Unfortunately even without the (huge) dhcp client it no longer fits on a single floppy. This is not a shock as thewall only fit with about 30k to spare on the 4.5 release. So... since the 4.5 version fits my needs I’m declaring the project finished. Thanks to everyone who helped.... read more

An active "user" account was inadvertently left in the PC versions of theWall. This account was apparently picked up from the original PicoBSD sources. It is highly recommended that this account be deleted. To delete it simply use the editor to delete the last line of /etc/master.passwd, run the update script, and then reboot. The net4501 versions of theWall are not effected.

A new version of theWall for the PC is now available that provides support for the PPPoE protocol typically used by DSL providers. The compact flash version of theWall for the net4501 has also been updated to support PPPoE.

Special thanks to Harold Price, Martin Collins, Julien Maerten, and Jan Hendrik Montag for helping me test PPPoE !

Rebuilt from FreeBSD 4.5 release sources. See http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/relnotes-i386.html for details. Several changes were made to theWall's configuration files to ease installation. PPPoE version coming soon !

The pxe bootable and compact flash versions of theWall have been rebuilt from FreeBSD 4.5 release. See http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/relnotes-i386.html for details. No changes to the basic theWall configuration were made.

The PC version of theWall has been released. The first release includes support for static IP addresses and dhcp. PPPoE is planned for a future release.

This release is based on PicoBSD/FreeBSD 4.4 release and includes bug fixes to theWall.

I have successfully initialized a compact flash
card using the tools included with this release.

A compact flash based version of theWall will be
released shortly.

The first release of theWall is finally out. Whew!
This configuration is a pxe bootable image for the Soekris net4501 card.
Source (well really just a bunch of scripts and a configuration tree) and
prebuilt binaries are included.