SmoothWall Express 3.0 'Polar' PocketCD

Introduction

Express 3.0 is our latest version of the long running and successful SmoothWall Express firewall.

Editions

Polar PocketCD is available in four editions:

• User edition - 32bit - sku: 01.141.300.01
• Developer edition - 32bit - sku: 01.141.300.03
• User edition - 64bit - sku: 01.141.300.02
• Developer edition - 64bit - sku: 01.141.300.04

The developer editions includes the complete SmoothWall Express functionality, but also contains the needed tools for working on Express itself, including complete builds, check outs and commits. It is therefore possible for interested coders to work on Express from their very own firewall. This marks a turning point for SmoothWall: it is now easier then ever for people to work on the project, make custom modifications and get involved with the SmoothWall team.

Please bear in mind that in order to do full builds of Express, a reasonable spec machine and a fair of amount of patience is required. Typical build times are about 5 hours for a 1Ghz machine.

Please read the build notes for more information on using the Developer Edition edition of Polar, including instructions on how to checkout and build a Polar ISO from scratch.

64bit support

Degu (the version before Sammy, our Release Candidate) was the first ever version of SmoothWall to come in multiple architectures: 32bit, for standard x86 compatibles; and 64bit, for Intel Core 2s (and other Intels with 64bit support) and 64bit Athlon chips. This change to multiple processor types means that updates are specific to the different architectures. We are especially interested to hear from people running Smoothie on 64bit machines.

Please note that there are some small limitations on hardware support when running on a 64bit machine. The BeWAN driver, used in Smoothie for years, is not available on 64bit machines because it uses a binary blob (compiled code) that is not available for 64bit machines. Also, the Connexant driver does not work on 64bit machines.

Headline new features relative to 2.0.

• Supports a 4th NIC for Wireless Access Points.
• 64bit support - additional builds for 64bit Intel and AMD chips.
• Based upon linux 2.6 kernel.
• New realtime traffic graph shows traffic bandwidth usage over time (AJAX).
• Per-IP address traffic statistics collection in all traffic stats pages - you can now view weekly, monthly, etc totals for specific internal IPs, or see which local IP is using the most bandwidth, in real-time.
• IM proxy with logging and filtering abilities (MSN/AIM/ICQ/Yahoo).
• SATA/SCSI support.
• Support for many new gigabit NICs.
• Streamlined installer/setup.
• Quality-of-Service (QoS) support for traffic-shaping and management - nice and easy to use but powerful, can traffic shape Peer-to-Peer traffic.
• SIP proxy support using siproxd, with transparent mode.
• Protection-level profile selector at install time can be used to pre-configure default settings.
• Timed-access feature for allowing or blocking access to a list of IPs or subnets based on time of day and day of the week.
• Outbound filtering.
• Portforward and other networking pages now use the new service list controls.
• New update mechanism which can download and install all pending updates with a single click.
• Brand new even prettier theme. The polar bear is back!
• Devel editions for people interested in hacking on smoothie.

Detailed list of new features and impovements