So, as per usual, everything has gone wrong (this time it was actually my fault -it happens :D)

After realising that there was no way in hell SmoothWall would ever accept an NTFS drive, or rather I just didn’t have the knowledge to do it, I moved on to other ideas; That’s where I came across IPFire, which is basically IPCop + SmoothWall + Awesomeness.

I know the whole idea of IPCop and SmoothWall is primarily to provide a solid firewall, but with all the mods you can get for both of them, it almost seems pointless not to be able to increase functionality to include network storage.

IPFire is essentially the same idea as the other two (in fact it’s based on IPCop I believe) except its using a newer kernel, and includes kernel modules such as NTFS-3G and FUSE so that its able to read/write NTFS without problems, and it even includes facility called ExtraHD which as far as I can tell is an fstab editor.

My favourite feature of all is Pakfire, which is a package installation system (like apt, yum, etc.). Its a highly simplified version, but its perfect. It will hopefully take away the need for command line crap. I sincerely hope I don’t ever have to open PuTTy again :D. (yeh right)

Anyways, I downloaded the ISO, burnt it and away we go right, backed up all the important stuff, plugged in the ol’ CD drive, rebooted (took ages to get into the bios to make it the boot device – damned thing gives you about 5ms to press F2 -and didn’t even tell you what button to press), and installed it. No problem right? Well not exactly, as you may have already guessed; so here goes: it installed IPFire onto …the 2TB media harddrive…. All of those movies gone, 1.2TB of entertainment obliterated… gone…

You have no idea how stupid I felt after that.

After I stopped banging my head against the wall, I unplugged the 2TB, installed IPFire on the 80GB it was supposed to.

So once again I’ve managed to make one problem into several.