untangle with intel pcmcia nic
I'm currently setting up Untangle firewall for a client on a Panasonic CF-19 toughbook. In Australia at least, this is an economical solution with a used CF-19 MK3 toughbook selling for around $400 on eBay and an Intel MLBA3300 PCMCIA network adaptor with dongle available for less than $50 from eBay USA. The PCMCIA adaptor is a necessity as you need at least two network adaptors to use Untangle.
Initially, after installing untangle I ran into issues using the PCMCIA nic with Untangle. It initialised as eth1 and the link states (that is, whether a cable was plugged in or not) correctly reflected as up and down. That's it though. DHCP configuration would fail on that link. Setting a static IP would result in no traffic flow.
Eventually I took a look at dmesg and spotted the error:
e100: eth0: e100_request_firmware: Failed to load firmware "e100/d101s_ucode.bin": -2
A quick search presented a solution: missing firmware in Debian and how to fix the problem.
Basically the problem is that the firmware for the MLBA3300 PCMCIA nic (and presumably, many other devices) is not included in the stock Debian install. It's easy to resolve this:
edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment squeeze main contrib non-free
apt-get update
apt-get install firmware-linux-nonfree
I rebooted, watched dmesg for confirmation of the sucessful loading of the firmware, and sure enough when Untangle had loaded the PCMCIA nic worked just as expected.
I'm excited about the simplicity of this set up for a number of reasons:
Running untangle on a laptop means we have a cheap, built in battery backup in the event of power failure
The CF-19 is a rugged sealed unit with no fans and capable of operating in all sorts of nasty conditions - such as being shoved under a desk somewhere out of sight in a tangle of cables as is often the case in these small business environments.
Should the unit need maintenance in the future, there's a screen and a keyboard built in right there for any IT contractor that might be performing the work.
If you're going to try this, make sure you choose a laptop with good linux hardware support and an intel network card.