Fighting with Alix Board + FreeBSD 7.x (update for FreeBSD 8.x)
I’m currently installing a new sandbox for our DSL customers.
The idea is quite simple: Once a customer is virus infected or doing something nasty put him into a sandbox using some firewall forwading (IPFW) and squid magic. I’ve created such a sandbox about 3 years ago – but I have new ideas and some updates I want to bring in. I will probably show how the whole system works in a later post.
But before going live with the new sandbox I just wanted to test the basics and make sure i have some proof of concept that everything is working as planned.
So I took one of my PCengines Alix board (alix2d3) and decided to install FreeBSD 7.2 on it.
Sounds easier as it is but here are the steps what I did:
Installing FreeBSD to have a PXEboot Environment using a serial console
Actually, installing FreeBSD over the network is quite simple and consists of following tasks:
- configure a DHCP server
- configure a TFTP server
- configure a NFS server
- prepare the data for the installation
- modify some stuff on the nfs host
- boot the alix box and install everything needed
- reboot alix box and enjoy
So, but some stuff is really tricky…