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Install IPCop from a USB Drive
May 1st, 2009IPCop is a really neat open source project that can basically transform any old computer with 2 NIC’s in it in to a hardware firewall, VPN server, and Web Filter, among many other useful things.
We use it quite a lot where I work and we’re always looking for the smaller, better IPCop box.
The most recent version we went with was a 1U half-depth rack mount server from the guys over at abmx.com. This unit was both cheap, and met our needs of a rack-mountable IPCop machine.
The slight downside to this machine was there was no CD-Rom drive in it as our past IPCop boxes have had. In addition, there was no IDE port on the motherboard (only SATA), and we didn’t have a SATA CD-Rom drive hanging around the office, so I set out to figure out how to install IPCop from a USB drive.
After a ton of searching I came across some instructions, which I will post for you in case you ever want to do the same.
1) Download the “usb-fdd” from the IPCop Downloads page.
2) Download a utility called dd for windows. I am also providing a download link here in case that page ever disappears, because dd for windows is vital to making this happen.
3) Extract the dd.exe file from the zip, and extract the ipcop-[version]-install-usb-fdd.i386.img file from the .gz file you downloaded, put them both in the same directory.
4) Insert a USB drive. Any files on this drive will be WIPED so be sure if there is anything you need on it, to copy the files off it!!!
5) Open up a command window and CD to the directory your dd.exe file and IPCop .img file are sitting. Run this command:
dd if=ipcop-install-usb-fdd-1.4.11.i386.img of=\\.\g: bs=1k
In my example above my USB drive was g: you will want to change that letter to what ever drive your USB drive is on your machine of course
6) That’s it! It will take about 5 minutes to write the image to the USB drive. When dd.exe is done it will return you to the command prompt. You’re ready to stick the USB drive in your soon-to-be IPCop machine, boot off it, and install it!
One thing to note is that this utility reformats your USB drive to the size needed by the image (around 50mb). Optimally it’d be cool to have say a 64mb flash drive around that you could just leave as an IPCop install stick (well, that’d be nice for me since I do a lot of IPCop installs). When you’re wanting to reclaim your flash drive for regular use, you’ll want to right click on it in windows, and format it back to the appropriate size using FAT32. Otherwise you will be like me with a 2gb flash driver partitioned to 50mb and wondering why your 800mb BackTrack 3 boot image won’t copy over to it! haha
Anyway, I hope someone finds this article useful. If not, I know I will the next time I need to do an IPCop USB Install.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Thanks a loooooooooooooooooooooooot -:) I was looking for it for the same problem. Cheers –
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
thanks, it was easy to follo, wbut a little problem trying to find the usb-fdd image file but finally it was rewarding
again thanks a lot
July 13th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Dude, many thanks indeed. I’m goin’ to build a new system w/o a CD-ROM, just an HDD, and the USB Stick.
I would recommend this to a friend, or someone who wants to build a firewall system.
I tried extracting the .gz file that i downloaded from the IE web browser, didn’t work, used FF 3.0.11, and it extracted w/ no problems
YAY!
August 20th, 2009 at 11:33 pm
I’ve been trying all thiese steps but I got a message that reads “no cdrom found”. I’ll try tomorrow disconecting the FDD and CDROM, I’ll only leave the USB drive,(Dell Dimension c521, only Sata Ports )
I’m want to install ipcop in a new computer that has 4 GB on RAM Because that current one, only has 2 GB, my network is around 250 computers and for any reason the memory and cache got 97 % of use and then web proxy stop and internet goes down
Any other Idea ?
thank you very much
Hugo Perales ( hiperat@yahoo.com.mx )
February 10th, 2010 at 4:40 am
thanks a lot for this guide, it worked fine for me.
cheers
February 15th, 2010 at 12:50 am
I get the following error:
C:\dd>dir
Volume in drive C has no label.
Volume Serial Number is FC8A-C2EE
Directory of C:\dd
02/15/2010 11:52 AM .
02/15/2010 11:52 AM ..
12/06/2003 03:50 PM 18,325 Copying.txt
02/26/2007 08:50 PM 342,016 dd.exe
02/26/2007 08:19 PM 4,319 ddchanges.txt
01/22/2010 02:01 AM 54,411,264 ipcop-1.9.11-install-usb-fdd.i486.img
4 File(s) 54,775,924 bytes
2 Dir(s) 11,514,855,424 bytes free
C:\dd>dd if=ipcop-1.9.11-install-usb-fdd.i486.img of=\\.\J: bs=1k
rawwrite dd for windows version 0.5.
Written by John Newbigin
This program is covered by the GPL. See copying.txt for details
Error opening output file: 32 The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process
February 15th, 2010 at 9:40 am
Something has your image file locked. Either an explorer process, or something else. Try copying the file and renaming it and using that file.