At work today, I got my hands on a old Watchguard Firebox II firewall device. I have always hated the Windows program needed to configure the boxes, and even how they run. I found this site a while back, and decided to do the obvious. Make the device better then it was intended to be...

Here is the walkthrough he created: http://www.ls-net.com/m0n0wall-watchguard/ most of his writings worked great for me. Except a few, which I will list here incase you have the same problems.

I did not use a flash, or a special cable to setup this system. The only cable I had was an 40 pin IDE cable, and a 40 to 44 pin converter. This converter is ment to run laptop drives in a desktop system, I just reversed it in this case.

The graphics card was a slight problem for me, I tried 3 different PCI video cards with no luck. I happened to find a S3 Virge/DX 2MB Video card, and this seemed to work, as seen in the walkthroughs photos, he also had an S3 video card.

I never touched an Flash Eraser Jumper. The only jumper on mine was near the battery, and it seemed to cause the onboard flash disk of 8MB in size to switch from Master to Slave. I set it opposite from the default, and put my drive as master.

On my hard drive that I used in the beginning, I did the physdiskwrite program to put m0n0wall on the drive, then near the end did the command to tell the next upgrade to install to the flash.

After the booting process, first time setup of m0n0wall, the Auto-Detection, DOES NOT WORK for me. I had to manually assign the interface names to the interface types. Lucky me, I got them correct the first time, they just go in order: dc0 = WAN, dc1 = LAN, dc2 = OPT1 and there you go.

The command used was the same: echo ad1 > /var/etc/cfdevice then perform an Firmware Update from the web interface.

These were the problems I had, but in the end, it's a great hack, and I love the red box now running a much better software package.