Turn your old PC into a firewall appliance.

You may have an old desktop PC sitting in a closet or somewhere. Did you know that you still can make it useful? In this guide, I will demonstrate the steps to turn your old pc into a network firewall appliance.

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1. First, please check what you need to prepare.

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1.1) an old desktop pc.
1.2) a gigabit ethernet adapter.
1.3) a usb stick.

2. Mount the ethernet adapter and connect the cables.

There is only one onboard ethernet adapter, so I need to add another PCI adapter.

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The green chip on left is the new added ethernet adapter.

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Now let’s connect the cables.

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3. Install WFilter NGF system.

Now you can install WFilter NGF with your usb stick. Please check a more detailed guide at here: WFilter NG Firewall Installation Guide

You shall be able to the console upon successful installation.
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Set your laptop to “dynamic ip address” and open http://192.168.10.1 in browser, you can access webUI to set the system up.

4. See what I get.

The CPU is “Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2160 1.8G”, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 160G harddisk.

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Let’s check the performance. Wow, it can handle 200+ clients with 20K concurrent connections. Isn’t it amazing?

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For more features of WFilter NGF, please check: WFilter NG firewall