Hmm … Maybe FreeBSD is the way to go with this project? FreeBSD 6.0 was “released” November 4th … That’s the new logo over to the left there … I had played with it a bit after setting up the FreeBSD 4.11 firewall, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results … Also, when upgrading the source, it didn’t seem there were any updates available … So it’s still pretty new …
Working on the OpenBSD machine, I was getting frequent errors … The machine would halt, and I would be left with booting … This was an intermittent problem, and seemed to be related to the network interface although I did seem to get a video error once or twice … I am just speculating as I have no idea what the error messages are reporting … I can only guess by Googling and sampling like results … Waiting for the machine to boot and go through the Raid controller boot was a pain too …
I built the OpenBSD machine on a Proliant 1850R, so rather than blow away my work, I simply swapped out the drives to try the FreeBSD 6.0 solution … I am using two 18G drives in a Raid 0+1 setup … This will save my ass down the road … As you can see, I sort of go back and forth in my work … Each time going through it, there may be something new I find or an option that I may have changed my mind on … I currently have the FreeBSD 6.0 installation to the point where it’s a working server … Running an SMP kernel and having Apache 2.0 with PHP4 installed …
My ultimate goal is to have an IPless filtering bridge with a network card behind the bridge for machine management. I mapped out this configuration in a drawing here … I sent this off to the freebsd-pf list requesting advice … Many of my searches didn’t return reliable information, and the stirring on that list didn’t bring back definitive answers, but that it’s possible … It seemed to me that OpenBSD was going to be a better solution … So I will go back and forth and see which works better for me … I think I know how to thwart the OpenBSD halts now since I had a similar situation on the FreeBSD install … I installed FreeBSD 6.0 via FTP … It also seems to me that FreeBSD is sort of getting comparable to OpenBSD in its distribution in this manner as well as attempting to implement tried and true solutions only available on OpenBSD until the release of FreeBSD 6.0 … I think I am on the bleeding edge, and I am documenting this as I go and have already started a document on it in my testing area …
There are three reasons to get this working in this manner … One is that having the card in there that can talk to the network will enable me to keep the machine current with easy access for cvsup’ing my ports and source … Two would be that the firewall will report to me nightly … Previously having the IPless firewall without network access, I didn’t know if there were problems developing on that machine since I didn’t receive the nightly maintenance messages … and finally, having access to the machine and running an Apache installation on there, I will be able to produce pretty graphs to display the firewall’s activity …
I’ve been playing with