Presenting: Trashwall
Presenting: the Trashwall, a repurposed Power Mac G4 AGP. It has been taken from an old, failing machine and turned into a powerful firewall which boots from flash, contains an 8-port managed switch, offers free public wireless via a segmented, built-in access point, and handles NAT, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and whatever else I might want it to do.
It’s also got a shiny serial console for setup / management and Open Firmware. It’s basically a real PowerPC UNIX box now.
The article is complete, I’m just waiting for a small antenna adapter cable to arrive so I can hook up the better 802.11b antenna. After that I’ll post one more photo to the article, but otherwise it’s complete.
So, if you’re wanting to stick together an OpenBSD-based do-everything firewall, you could do far worse than to check out the Trashwall.
Just out of interest, does said Trashwall contain any features out-of-the-box to stop random kids from hooking to my WiFi and torrenting massive amounts of data?
I’m considering setting one up, y’see, just because I’d like to give free public WiFi access but need it to be fairly secure first.
No, that it doesn’t. I considered looking into it, but I sort of doubt that many people will use it, particularly where I live.
That said, I do plan on looking into bandwidth-limiting on a per-client basis, or somehow (attempting to) block bittorrent and other p2p stuff on the public part of the network.
It would all be done in /etc/pf.conf. The port blocking is trivial, but the bandwidth limiting will take a bit more effort, particularly with how I already do bandwidth-related stuff outbound on the public interface. If I can I’d like to create a bucket which will give each IP a fast first 1MB of traffic per connection, then drop it down to 20kbps or so. That’d keep browsing / mail working well, but it’d slow down big downloads.