The building of my L.U.S.T firewall.

This is the building of my first L.U.S.T (Let.U.Sleep.Tight) firewall which runs on the legendary m0n0wall software.
M0n0wall is the perfect solution if you want to run a dedicated ‘hardware’ firewall and when you have some old crappy hardware laying around. It will run on almost anything.

L.U.S.T features an Intel Celeron processor with 128 Mb RAM and 4 NICs. The 4 NICs represent a WAN, LAN, DMZ and OPT1 interface. All is housed in an old 19″ HP server rack which I found somewhere on ebay a long time ago. The hard drive is replaced by an IDE to SD card converter with a 4 Gb SD card. The newest version of m0nowall only needs 16MB to run. Replacing the hard drive for a SD card makes it all more eco-friendly and less power consuming. Speaking of which; you might also want to passively cool the processor and get rid of the PSU ventilator.

The single configuration file is stored on a 1.44″ floppy disk. Little tricky and not that safe but when you have one, better use it. Just so it will remind you about the good old days…

The whole configuration has a general throughput of 300mb/s!

Specs:
- 666 Mhz Intel Celeron processor
- 128 Mb RAM (SDRAM, wew!)
- 4 Gb SD card + converter
- 4x Intel Pro 1000 MT NICs
- 1.44” floppy drive

Some photo’s of the hardware used and the test setup.

L.U.S.T is now running for almost 90 days without the need to reset it. Always reliable and solid as a rock!

Some other m0n0wall projects can be found here.