Getting to Know IPCop - Network Angle

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Many people have heard and aware about this, I believe. IPCop is one of the best free and Open Source stateful firewall filter for small and medium enterprise network. It is one of Linux distribution which was built by IPCop team. You can, of course, install this appliance on a PC hardware. The main purpose of this awesome tool is to protect any network that it is installed on, along with some others goal in mind to provide stable, secure, opensourced, highly configureable, easily maintain and configure with GUI, and enjoyable environment of a Linux Firewall Distribution.

The History

IPCop was first released for revision 1.0 on January 01, 2002. Twelve months later, on December 22, a new revision 1.1 was released to fix some problem. In April 01, 2003, revision 1.2 was announced along with the change which include restore during install. Some months after that, version 1.3 and 2.0 was released in 2004 and 2009 accordingly. In 2007, IPCop was once awarded in Infoworld Magazine Bossie for innovation in Open Source.

The latest and stable release of IPCop is 2.1.9 which was announced in February 23, 2015. In order to run IPCop version 2.1.9, you have to install 2.1.8 first then do the upgrade because there are no install package for 2.1.9.

The Installation

CAUTION: Installing IPCop requires you to formate your hard drive and all data on it will be lost.

It is exactly the same way you install Windows or Linux Operating System onto your PC or laptop. First thing first, you have to create a installation source by download the IPCop image and burn it to a CD or USB.

Booting from a CD

After you create an installation source (burn IPCop to a CD in this case), put it in a PC’s CD-ROM drive then start the boot sequence by pressing the reset button. Wait one minute and the first screen will appear and look like this or different depending on version.

As you can see the instruction indicates, you can press RETURN (Enter key) to install IPCop or F1 for help and more features abut IPCop.

After that, another screen will appear. It is about language choosing. You can choose any language but be aware that not all of them are completely translated.

Next, you have to choose keyboard mapping. You can use arrow key to move cursor and Space or Enter key to select.

Next, you have to choose timezone for your location. Same to Keyboard Mapping, you can use arrow key to move and Space or Enter key to select.

Then there is another screen popup and ask you to choose date and time.

After you complete choosing date and time, you are now moved to a disk selection.

Then a confirmation windows will appear. You can simply verify and click OK to continue.

Next, you have to choose one option among two between standard installation on a hard drive and on a flash memory card.

If you choose Flash, the following windows will appear and ask you to put the amount of RAM to reserver for temporary storage.

If you choose HardDrive instead of Flash, then it will jump directly to standard installation as example below.

Wait few minutes to allow installation to complete.

The Setup

After you install IPCop, you have to go through this process to setup your IPCop.

First thing is about setting up a hostname. Put a hostname of IPCop and click Ok to continue.

Next, put a domain name.

Now it is time to select a Red interface. Red interface is referred to Interface facing interface. Select option that suit to your connection and put necessary network information accordingly.

Then you have to select Network card and put them into appropriate zone (RED, GREEN, BLUE, ORANGE…). Below is the sample of assigning one NIC to the GREEN zone and another one into RED zone.