Small private network-how could I set it up?

[Dabombinable]

I'm planning on creating my own small network with an; ADSL wireless router (limited to wifi for accessing the internet due to house design-split levels), Hardware fire wall with VPN (sole point of internet access for all of my computers-connected to router over wireless N), main rig/laptop, NAS/media center. This is what I was thinking of (yes its done in paint, but there isn't much room for anything fancy on a 60GB HDD):

 

How should I go about setting this up? The HW firewall will be made from one of my more disposable legacy rigs (Celeron 300A-Pentium III 1GHz, 20GB HDD, 768MB RAM), and my NAS/media center from an XP pro based PC (XP needed for raid driver support). I'm open to all ideas and suggestions as I've never done something like this before. Also, would it be possible to set up the HW firewall to handle a VPN? (I'm in Australia-no one is going to view metadata from my computers if I can help it).

Thanks in advance to anyone that helps me get this done.

Cheers

Dabombinable.

[Footy]

Personally I would use a Linux distro and use IP tables

[Dabombinable]

Personally I would use a Linux distro and use IP tables

I was already planning to install a Linux distro on the HW fire wall anyway, is there a specific distro I should look at? As for IP tables I'll need to learn how to use them-I'm good with the hardware side of computers but I'm only just getting into the software and programming.

[dzonidev]

pfsense is nice, sophos, utangle, smoothwall, ipfire, etc...

 

http://www.mondaiji.com/blog/other/it/10175-the-hunt-for-the-ultimate-free-open-source-firewall-distro

 

At home I have a Barracuda Spam Firewall 300, that I am in the process of re-purposing and my NAS is running WHS 2011. All that connected to a Netgear GS116

[Gex]

I was already planning to install a Linux distro on the HW fire wall anyway, is there a specific distro I should look at? As for IP tables I'll need to learn how to use them-I'm good with the hardware side of computers but I'm only just getting into the software and programming.

As mentioned above there are many distros for this type of thing to choose from, and people will debate to the end of the earth on which one is the best.

The first time I did something like this was with pfSense, it was pretty easy, and these types of firewall orientated distros have easy to use GUI's so you wont need to learn iptables, even if you've never configured a firewall rule in your life it's pretty basic.

[friede]

Are you planning on giving the wireless clients the ability to use a vpn connection?

[Dabombinable]

pfsense is nice, sophos, utangle, smoothwall, ipfire, etc...

 

http://www.mondaiji.com/blog/other/it/10175-the-hunt-for-the-ultimate-free-open-source-firewall-distro

 

At home I have a Barracuda Spam Firewall 300, that I am in the process of re-purposing and my NAS is running WHS 2011. All that connected to a Netgear GS116

I'll have to try them out.

 

As mentioned above there are many distros for this type of thing to choose from, and people will debate to the end of the earth on which one is the best.

The first time I did something like this was with pfSense, it was pretty easy, and these types of firewall orientated distros have easy to use GUI's so you wont need to learn iptables, even if you've never configured a firewall rule in your life it's pretty basic.

I'm going to try them all out, so I'll go by what works best with my setup.

 

Are you planning on giving the wireless clients the ability to use a vpn connection?

The hardware firewall will be accessing the internet through a VPN, because it means that instead of actually needing to set up a VPN on ever computer I attach, I just need to plug in the ethernet cable and I'm browsing in true privacy, with minimal fuss.