Chapter 1. Introduction

Table of Contents

1.1. What m0n0wall is
1.2. What m0n0wall is not
1.3. History
1.4. Features
1.4.1. Components
1.4.2. Specifications
1.5. Software Copyright and Distribution (Licenses)
1.5.1. Other Software Packages
1.6. Contributors and Credits
1.6.1. Code
1.6.2. Documentation

1.1. What m0n0wall is

m0n0wall is a complete embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software). m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server (thttpd), PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent.

m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format.