NuFW.Live in persistent mode

License of this document

This document is copyrighted by INL ((c) 2008), and distributed under the Creative Commons by-nc-sa license. The full text of the license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode

Introduction

In order to test NuFW.Live more deeply, you may save your parameters to a hard disk.

Requirements

To make the backup, you will need an external or internal hard disk or a USB key or any other storage device supported by Knoppix, with an ext2 or ext3 of FAT32 partition. NTFS file system is highly unrecommended because its support is still experimental for the backup of the live CD.

For simple tests, you will need 100 MB of available space on that partition. Knoppix will simply create a file named knoppix.img at the root directory of the file system.

If you use the live CD to modify the partitions on a drive, you will have to reboot the live CD after the partitioning, or else the backup tool will not work.

Setup

To set up this feature, go to the menu K, then Knoppix, Configure and Create a persistent KNOPPIX disk image.

The application will first show what its about to do and ask for confirmation. After reading the text, you can click on yes.

The first choice to make concerns the partition which will contain the image. A select list is shown, with available space and type of file. We have tested only ext3, but the format vfat should also be well supported.

Knoppix offers to encrypt the image so as to prevent anyone from reading it without knowing the password. For a test machine, this kind of precaution is not needed, so click on no. However, if you do want to encrypt the image, you will have to enter a 20-character long password (or longer) or else the whole procedure will fail.

The application will now ask to set the amount of space which is to be allowed for the image. For simple tests, 100 MB should be enough; for more advanced tests, you will have to take into account the size of the log database, according to the network traffic.

Once you have validated the last form, the image formatting starts and can last several minutes on a large volume of data.

Once the formatting is over, the application announces the operation is done. To check that everything works all right, and to use the image, reboot NuFW.Live via the menu.

Rebooting

When the machine reboots, a screen like the following will be displayed, and without interaction on your part, the image will be loaded. Once the desktop is ready, you can start configuring the firewall.