My Unisys Smoothwall Box
December 2003 update: The Unisys box has been retired, after
suffering from frequent spontaneous reboots caused by a failing PSU
(with a low 5v rail).
It's been replaced with a low profile Dell Optiplex GXi P133.
My Smoothwall box consists of the following hardware:
-
Unisys CWD50001-ZE PC:
-P100 processor
-2 x 32Mb RAM
-2Gb laptop HDD
-low profile NE ISA NIC
-3COM 3C900 PCI NIC
-floppy drive
-2 serial ports, 1 parallel port
-PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports
-manufactured 24 July 1996
-
D-Link DSL-300+
ADSL modem
The Unisys CMD series are a very small footprint PC, with onboard
video and network.
A full-size hard drive can be installed, but I chose to install
a laptop hard drive, to keep the noise and heat levels down
as much as possible.
front view
rear view, showing power,
ps/2 keyboard cable (for my status LEDs),
serial modem cable (when I was on dialup), and CAT5 ethernet cable
inside the case
(note that a PCI NIC was added later)
Installation of a laptop HDD requires the use of a laptop HDD adaptor,
which I purchased from Jaycar
(catalogue no PL0754).
It allows you to use a laptop HDD on a normal IDE cable.
laptop HDD adaptor
I've configured the network configuration type to be
GREEN + RED,
as I use an ADSL modem with an ethernet connection for my Internet connection.
To configure the low profile ISA network card, I
used some DOS utilities (44KB download available from
here)
to configure IRQ of the ISA NIC to be 10,
and the I/O to be 0x300.
Smoothwall failed to probe the NIC, but manually specifying the module as
ne io=0x300 irq=10 allowed Smoothwall to correctly
load the module for the NIC.
Once I moved from dialup to ADSL, I installed a 3COM 3C900 PCI network card into the PCI/ISA slot.
Smoothwall successfully probed and found the card, and used the
3c59x module.
However, it defaulted to 10base2 mode (ie, the coax connector),
and I had to force it to 10baseT mode by specifying
options=0x200 for the module
(based on info I found here).
The DLink DSL-300+ modem was very easy to setup, as it has a built-in DHCP server, and includes
a PPPoE client.
I configured Smoothwall's red interface for DHCP, and plugged the modem in.
Using a browser on my green network, I went to the modem's web interface (http://192.168.0.1),
and configured the PPPoE client in the modem, and connected to my ISP.
The PC resides in my server cupboard, and is only shutdown when
a reboot is required by a Smoothwall patch, or if there's
a nearby thunderstorm causing power fluctuations.
last updated 20 Oct 2004
|
|
