Topic: SME with smoothwall help please

[brit-dub]

Hi from a complete newbie.

I need some help with my setup. At the moment I use a smoothwall box to connect to the internet.

I have 4 clients connected to the smoothwall, these are all family computers. This setup has served us well for a number of years.

I would now like to add in the SME server, the reason for this is file sharing without having to have all the clients switched on. The main share folder has to be the music folders, and I think this would be best put on a central server. I would like to use the mail server later on.

The question is which server configuration should I use, from what I have read I should use server only mode. And make use of me smoothwall setup.

But when I tried this I could not get it to work. I had nic 1 setup as the server with the dhcp enabled (10.10.10.1). Nic 2 connected to smoothwall (192.168.0.1), smoothwall also running a dhcp server in the hope that SME would acquire an IP address this way. All the clients could work with the server, but none of them could access the internet. It looked to me as if nic 2 was not communicating with smoothwall.

So I have now tried the server and gateway setup, nic 1 and 2 as above, now this works allowing me to both use the server functions and the smoothwall as my internet connection. The only problem so far is that I can’t access the smoothwall control page, via https:192.168.0.1:441 from within my network which is on 10.10.10.1

Any advice most welcome.

Regards

Brit

[Tib]

Hi there,

For starters in server only mode you only use 1 nic .... not 2.

and the reason you cant access your smoothwall interface is because your are now on a totally diff IP range.

People tend to forget that to access pannels of other interfaces and equipment you have to be on the same IP range unless you add that IP range into the local networks pannel.

Question ... why are you running smoothwall as well as SME.

SME can firewall, file serve, mail serve etc very well.

If you want to stay with smoothwall ... setup your SME box as server only mode with only one nic. Auth with smoothwall DHCP by sending SME's nic card address as identifier (not IP address) or just set a static IP address on it ... as a server prob better as a static IP address (make sure you give it an IP address in the range that your curret network is on).

Then you will be on the same IP range as your smoothwalll unit and the rest of the PC's.

Just be aware that your SME box in server only mode will relly on your smoothwall unit to be a good firewall.

Hope this helps,

Tib

[brit-dub]

Hi Tib thanks for the reply.

I have it working now, well the file server side. I will look into the mail and firewall soon.

Point taken regarding the firewall, I understand that Linux comes with a very good firewall as standard, but for ease of setup and with the ease of which I can view logs and the like smoothwall will take some beating. But having said that I know very little about the SME firewall setup and look forward to reading a bit more about it. After all one less computer running has to be better all round.

Thanks once again for your time, I just couldn’t grasp the concept of the hub and one the use of only one NIC card.

Regards

brit