m0n0wall Virtual Firewall
virtual appliance firewall and router for protecting your Virtual Infrastructure
Description
m0n0wall Virtual Appliance
This didn't come out as well as I'd hoped. For a (slightly) more readable version of this, please visit http://chrisbuechler.com/m0n0wall/vmware/challenge/
m0n0wall Virtual Appliance
About m0n0wall
The m0n0wall project has been around for more than three
years, and in this time has become one of the most popular open source firewall
distributions due to its reliability, speed, flexibility, minimal hardware
requirements, and ease of management.
This passage from the m0n0wall web site provides an
excellent overview of the project and its primary focus:
"m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a
complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an
embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes
(including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software).
m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server,
PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one
single XML text file to keep things transparent."
Purpose of the Appliance
This appliance is intended for use in testing or
development environments, or in protecting production Virtual Infrastructure.
It is capable of using NAT, routing, or transparent bridging in any virtual
environment, and works on VMware Workstation, GSX, Server, and ESX.
Personal Involvement
I have been a committer with this project for nearly two
years now. I work primarily in the areas of documentation and assisting
users on the mailing list and in IRC, and have dedicated a very significant
amount of volunteer time to this project. As of May 25, 2006, I have more
than 2,000 posts to the m0n0wall mailing lists (99.9% of which were helping
others), surpassing the total of any other contributor several times over.
While, like most open source projects, the documentation is still lacking in
some areas, the vast majority of it has been written by me. It has gone
from almost nothing to being up to par with comparable projects due to my
contributions over the last two years.
Virtual Appliance History
I have used VMware Workstation since right after 4.0 was
released. While testing and documenting m0n0wall, I have always used
Workstation extensively to simulate complete network environments.
Questions routinely surfaced on the m0n0wall mailing list about using m0n0wall
with VMware. The most common issue was people having trouble configuring
it to work properly, for a wide variety of reasons. After seeing this
numerous times, and helping different people through the same issues over and
over, I set out to write up a document on installing m0n0wall in VMware.
As I started writing this document, I came to the
realization that it would be a lot easier if I just made up a template virtual
machine and distributed it. It became a big hit within the m0n0wall
community immediately upon its release on February 20, 2005.
http://m0n0.ch/wall/list/showmsg.php?id=137/92
I believe this makes my m0n0wall images the first widely
distributed community virtual appliance, several months before VMware announced
their community virtual appliance program.
As of May 25, 2006, the various versions of my virtual
appliance have been downloaded nearly 32,000 times, and are in use in numerous
installations around the world for a variety of purposes, from testing
Last updated: 05/26/2006
Operating system:
FreeBSD 4.11
Applications installed:
ez-ipupdate
mini_httpd
PHP
MPD
dnsmasq
ipsec-tools
msntp
UCD-SNMP
choparp
BPALogin
wol
ataidle
VMware Tools installed:
Yes
Size:
5 MB
Torrent available:
Yes
(What is BitTorrent?)
Primary account
Username: admin
Password: mono
Submitted by: cmbuechler
Download link provided by the submitter, not VMware. Report broken downloads here.
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