How to Configure Smoothwall
Welcome to the tutorial guide. The guide will provide the user with a brief introduction on how to configure Smoothwall Express 3.0. After the successful installation of Smoothwall, if you want to configure Smoothwall, then please follow advise and guidance as below:
Smoothwall can be best managed by using its Web based GUI by connecting to it from another local computer on the network. You can simply open the web browser and then type in the https address
It will ask you for your username and a password. If you have entered your username and password, a brand new theme which contains a variety of tabs will be displayed. Some of the tabs such as control, about, services and networking are provided below:
- Control
This is the front page of smoothwall and allows the user to see the status of their smoothwall in terms of uptime, bits transferred and a little scrolling map of traffic rate. A user can also shutdown/reboot the firewall from here or get detailed help. Apart from rebooting, a user can also register his/her Smoothwall by simply clicking on the large ‘My Smoothwall’ logo in the centre of the page.
About
The ‘about’ tab provides with details of whats running on the server. The main benefit of this tab is that it is useful for troubleshooting or just if you want to view the network usage and it’s history via six additional tabs, ’status’, ‘advanced’, ‘traffic graphs’, ‘bandwidth bars’, ‘traffic monitor’ and ‘my smoothwall’.
- Status tab. The ’status’ tab shows what services are currently running, and whether or not there is a problem with them
- Advanced tab
The ‘advanced’ tab brings up nice graphs of memory usage, inode usage, disk usage, uptime and users and more. You can’t actually do anything here, just see what is going on usage wise on your smoothwall server.
- Traffic grahs tab
The ‘traffic graphs’ tab shows how much traffic is being used up on your GREEN and RED interfaces
- Bandwidth tab
This tab shows the bandwidth usage in scrolling bars and the ‘traffic monitor’ which shows realtime network bandwidth usage graphs
- my smoothwall tab
This tab allows the user to carry out the registration of their interest in the product with the smoothwall team to receive email notifications
Services
In services, a user can carry out the configuration within Smoothwall. Services has got tabs such as web proxy, im proxy, pop3 proxy, dhcp service. Now, let’s go through the mentioned service tabs.
- Web proxy tab
The web proxy tab allows the user to configure smoothwalls integrated caching web proxy.
- im proxy
The im proxy tab allows a user to configure the Instant message proxy to monitor Msn, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC and AIM and even swear-word filtering.
- pop3 proxy
The pop3 proxy tab allows a user to remove viruses from emails that are retrieved using the POP3 protocol.
- sip proxy
The sip proxy tab allows a user to configure logging level, call logging and number of clients that can use the proxy
- dhcp service
The dhcp service presents with options such as network boot, static assignments, DNS, NTP, WINS, NIS
- dynamic DNS
The dynamic DNS allows a user to configure smoothwall to auto login to those domains so that they get the correct IP reported.
- static DNS
The static DNS allows a user to add static DNS entries to smoothwall’s inbuilt DNS server.
- Intrusion detection system (ids)
The ids is useful if a user wants to see potential security breach attempts
- remote access tab
If you are planning to use linux and like to ssh in to a box, you can do this on the ‘remote access‘ tab, by simply enabling it and ssh in from another box.
- time tab
The time tab will allows a user to change timezone or enable the built in time server.
Networking
Networking category will allow a user to block ips. Networking has tabs such as incoming, outgoing, time access tab.
- incoming
A user can provide instructions to smoothwall on how to forward specific TCP or UDP ports and to which machines on the local network.
- outgoing
A user can limit users on the GREEN interface to specific internet based services. A user can also use the pre-defined rules to allow or block services such as ftp, MSN, sftp, etc.
If a user wants to access a port on his/her GREEN network then he/she has to configure that in the internal tab.
external
A user can use external in order to let specific traffic in to SmoothWall services. A user can click on ip block tab in networking in order to block another person. This is done by clicking on the ip block tab and then adding his/her ip to the list of blocking rules.
timed access
The time access tab allows a user to configure individual rules for IP’s on his/her network, and also define whether to allow or reject the requests. In other words, a user can disable a computers internet access by an automated rule.
quality of service (qos)
This option enables a user to enforce different speeds for different appliactions/services. For example a user can give 30% of his/her bandwidth to VoIP or any other application on the network.
advanced tab
This tab allows a user to configure ICMP settings and can also block IGMP packets.
ppp
This allows a user to configure his/her ppp devices.
interfaces
The interfaces provides a user with a list of his/her network cards (RED/GREEN and more) and dns/gateway settings.
Virtual Private Networking (VPN)
The VPN allows a user to VPN multiple smoothwalls.
Logs
After a successful configuration of services such as im, ids, sip, pop3, web proxy, etc., a user can browse his/hvr logs and vies details sorted by date or time, IP address or website URL.
- System logs
The system logs provide a user with detailed information for smoothwall. If a user has a DHCP server problem, then he/she can check in that section of the system logs for any errors.
- Web proxy log
The web proxy log displays urls and ips of websites visited.
- Firewall log
This log lets a user view all the blocked attacks on his/her smoothwall.
- ids log
An ids log lets a user mark an ip in the firewall log and add it to the ‘block list’. A user can also use this log to do a lookup.
- The Instant messages
The instant messages shows real-time ‘chats’ as they happen,and it also shows who was chatting and when.
- The email logs
The email logs presents a user with a log of all emails passing though the POP3 proxy and Anti Virus engine.
Tools
The tools has got tabs such as: ip information, ip tools.
- ip information
ip information allows a user to perform a ‘whois’ lookup on an ip address or domain name,
- ip tools
ip tools lets a user ping or traceroute an ip
Maintenance
The maintenance has got tabs such as updates, modem, speedtouch usb firmware’, ‘passwords’, ‘backup’, ‘preferences’ and ’shutdown’.
If you have followed all advise and guidance as provided in this tutorial guide then you will have successfully configured Smoothwall.













