Endian Firewall 2.3 Extra Utilities

Because an Endian Firewall is often the only Linux box in a network, and because it sits at such an advantageous position on that network,  it is useful to be able to run certain utilities and/or drivers that aren’t included by default in an EFW 2.3 distribution.

These utilities are probably not included because they could be used for evil.  Regardless of your intention, here are some useful binaries built for EFW 2.3.  Download wget and scp it to your EFW box, then you can use wget to download the others.

• wget - handy for transferring files via http and ftp
• iperf - network performance (bandwith) testing tool
• noip2-i686 – because the noip2 client included with EFW just doesn’t seem to work
• r8169 – updated RTL-8169 module for NIC cards (needed to patch driver to get it to build)
• r8168 – RTL-8111 / 8168B kernel module (I built this my self, but also see this post)

How Were These Built?

Here is a quick summary:

1. Install and run VMWare-Server.
2. Create a virtual machine called efw-devel with two network interfaces.
3. Download EFW-COMMUNITY-2.2-rc3-200810071617.iso,
4. Mount the iso image as the CD drive attached to the virtual machine
5. Power on the virtual machine and install EFW as normal
6. Complete the EFW setup via the web interface
7. Login to the command line
8. Follow these instructions to setup the build environment and install vmware-tools (if you like)
9. Use wget / scp to copy the source files for the utility to be built
10. Build it (./configure; make)
11. Copy the binary to a live EFW machine

Network Drivers

To use the network kernel drivers (above), download and copy to /lib/modules/2.6.22.19-72.endian15/kernel/drivers/net/.  Run ‘depmod -a’, then reboot.  EFW doesn’t have the r8168 module, but it does come with another version of the r8169 module.  If this module is in use, you need to remove it (rmmod r8169) and delete/rename the old file first.

Some network cards (such as the NICS on the SuperMicro X7SLA-H) are detected as r8169, even though they should use r8168.  In this case, bridging doesn’t work – the br0 interface will be dead but the eth1 interface will work.  (This of course is no good because you have to use br0 for the initial configuration).  Installing the proper r8169 driver will fix bridging and get br0 working properly.  Edit /etc/modprobe.conf and change r8169 to r8168.