Build a Soekris / m0n0wall Firewall Appliance

I'm sure that most people in the networking world are aware of the m0n0wall open source firewall project. The m0n0wall package really shines when teamed with an embedded computer such as those from Soekris Engineering. I had a spare Soekris Net4521 left over from a rural wireless project that I decided to use to guard the newly formed Burns Ranch network. As you will see, there is very little to installing the m0n0wall package on the Soekris 4521 single board computer.
Parts List

Soekris Net4521 SBC
Compact Flash card (8 megs or more)
m0n0wall "net45xx" image
physdiskwrite utility

Installation

Installation is very easy and you can be up and running in five minutes. First, make sure you have a copy of the m0n0wall image and the physdiskwrite utility on your Windows desktop. Plug in your card reader and insert your Compact Flash module. To copy the m0n0 image to the CF card, you simply "drag" the image and "drop" it onto the physdiskwrite utility icon. This should cause the utility program to spawn a windows shell which will allow you to choose the destination of the CF card. Choose the destination associated with your CF card and the utility will transfer the image in a flash. This completes the software installation.

Plug the CF card into the Soekris board and connect a ethernet cable between the LAN port of the 4521 and the browser equipped computer. The LAN port on the Soekris will be the port nearest the serial port connector (see the above photo, marked "L"). You can now fire up your browser and point it to "http://192.168.1.1" to configure. The default user is "admin" and password is "mono".

It doesn't get any easier than that!