[Wolves] smoothwall

[Old Dan]

Aquarius wrote:

> fizzy spoo'd forth:
> 
>>Hi,
>>
>>I'm rather tempted to put smoothwall on the libretto.
>>There's a really good howto online, and it doesn't
>>seem that hard (famous last words!). The only question
>>I have is will smootwall work with only one physical
>>network card, or does it need two? Have googled but
>>not found anything saying it will work...
> 
> Gotta have two, by definition. Your firewall is the thing between the
> outside world (network 1) and your internal network (network 2); since
> it has to be on two networks, it needs two network cards...
Not exactly.  The machine running Smoothwall (2.0 Beta4, Mallard) here 
at work has only one network card, the internet interface being an 
Alcatel Speedtouch USB frogmodem whatsit, which I suppose is effectively 
a 'network card', except it's just... well... not.  :)

FWIW in the Smoothwall 2.0 betas, IME the port forwarding appears to be 
broken.  Or maybe it's just me being thick... (not suprising... :) )

What is your second interface to be?

>>Really enjoyed last nights meeting, thanks to all
>>those who attended,
> 
> As did I. Sorry I had to get going early, although I did make it from
> the Moon Under Water to my parents house near Cambridge in 90 minutes
> :) It was a really interesting conversation; possibly now you all think
> I'm a doomsayer, but it's a really, really big worry for me, all the
> things I talked about last night. I don't want to see our community
> legislated out of existence...
Neither do I, nor anyone else here I suspect, but I really don't think 
the situation regarding DRM is that bad.  I suspect what they'll do is 
build DRM into processors, yes, but have some sort of 'approved 
software' scheme or something going using something like the .net 
infrastructure where users have to connect and pay to use stuff. 
However, software which doesn't want to use the DRM would simply be able 
to switch it off, which will be fine because that software then won't be 
able to access files protected by DRM, which is exactly what the RIAA 
and whoever want.

I really *don't* think you'll get DRM chips in things like network cards 
and I *really really* don't think you'll need DRM to connect to the 
internet.  It would mean the whole world effectively having to replace 
their computers and network infrastructure.  It simply (probably) won't 
happen, and even if it does start to happen, even windoze people will 
start to wake up to the fact it's wrong, because it will start to affect 
*them*.

Also there is nothing to stop them building these keys directly into the 
network/processor hardware, which would mean that any software source 
code *could* be open-source because it wouldn't contain the keys used by 
DRM, only calls to commands on the chip.

-- 
Dan
Ever the optimist.