You will now have the chance to configure your keyboard mapping, time zone, passwords, and additional interfaces.

Select your keyboard layout using the TAB key, and again, TAB down to OK.

Repeat for your Time Zone

Next enter the hostname you would like, and TAB down to OK.

Choose an internal domain name, and TAB down to OK. I am leaving mine on the defaults. IPCOP.localdomain

Now you can configure your ISDN interfaces… what? you don’t have a brook trout ISDN card? Oh, well if your like me, and you DON’T need to use ISDN, i would choose to disable it.

TAB across to DISABLE ISDN and hit SPACE to accept.

Next we need to choose our NETWORK CONFIGURATION TYPE.

If you have followed the above advice you will need to choose GREEN + RED then TAB down to OK.

You will see a screen showing ‘pushing non local network down’

You’re then returned to the Network Configuration Menu.

Select Drivers and Card Assignments.

You will see your TULIP card is assigned to the GREEN NIC, but RED shows as UNKNOWN (UNSET)

We do wish to change these settings, so select OK.

Again you will see a screen showing ‘pushing non local network down’

You will now see a message about an unclaimed NIC, you can assign this NIC to RED, select OK.

All cards are now successfully allocated.

You can now set your address settings for your NICs.

We have already configured the GREEN NIC, so select RED and select OK.

This section will vary dependant on your own lab setup. I have my RED NIC set to use DHCP, and i have a DHCP server on the LAB network handing out an IP to it. Make sure you have a valid address to hand if you want to statically assign this.

I’m setting mine to DHCP.

When you’re ready, select DONE.

If you have selected to use a STATIC configuration on the RED NIC, you will then need to go ahead and enter DNS and GATEWAY information on the next menu.

You can also configure IPCOP to be a DHCP server,but we do not need to do that for this setup. You will be prompted to do this after selecting DONE on the network configuration menu.

When you’re happy with you configuration, select DONE.

On the DHCP Server Configuration menu, leave the defaults and select OK.

Make sure you don’t hit CANCEL at this point like i just did, if you do, i can’t say what your results will be like, so probably best to start over!

If your smart, and you don’t hit cancel, you can now enter your ‘root’ password. This is just used for console access.

As this is a lab system i am going to enter ‘password’ you won’t actually see the characters as you type them, TAB down to confirm, and TAB down to select OK.

Next is the ‘admin’ password – this is used when accessing the web console.

Now enter a password to be used when doing an export of your backup key.

Setup is now complete.

Your IPCOP VM will now reboot, and you will be able to access the web console of your system from a locally connected VM.

Your system will boot and you will see an ‘ipcop login:’ prompt when it has booted up.

The console is not something i have used to configure IPCOP so i will refer you to their documentation for configuration tips.

Update – 10/02/2016 Please see below comments re updated port numbers for IPCOP Login

If you logon to a locally connected VM you can access the console at: http://192.168.16.254:81

You will get redirected to an HTTPS site – so don’t be alarmed if you get a certificate warning.

If you want to get really clever with it, you can then start to use the firewall on the IPCOP to publish services on the ‘internal’ / ‘GREEN’ network, which you can then access from your physical network.

And there you have it, an operational NAT device to separate your Hyper-V guest machines.

I think i hit the limit for blog entry size – so have had to break this up into several entries.

Before we power it up, we need to add some network interfaces. As mentioned above IPCOP does not support the use of the Hyper-V synthetic NIC, so we need to add a ‘legacy’ network adapter. Well, two to be precise. As this is going to be our NAT device we need both an internal and an external interface.

So, lets go into the settings of our VM, Find your IPCOP machine in your VM list and right click and click settings.

This opens the Add Hardware section of the VM settings, select Legacy Network Adapter, and click Add.

You are now on the Legacy Network Adapter settings page, where you can choose which network this NIC will be connected to, the MAC address settings and the VLAN settings.

I am possibly showing my inexperience with Hyper-V now, but i have chosen to add this NIC to the ‘Private’ VM network i have created (a network just for the vm’s) and i also have mine set to use a dynamic MAC address.

When you’re ready hit ok, and the NIC will be added. Repeat the process so we have one NIC connected to the Private network for VM’s and one connected to the External network.

In my setup, the first NIC i add or rather the first NIC installed into the Hyper-V guest,  is the interface IPCOP treats as it’s GREEN interface. More on that in a bit.

Now that we have our NIC’s added we can boot up our VM. Close down the settings window and go back to the Hyper-V management console. Double click your IPCOP VM to open a connection to it, and hit the power button to power it up.

Your VM will start to power up, you will need to press enter when prompted to enter the IPCOP setup.

Choose your installation language.

Select OK to continue the installation.

Since we are using an ISO file as our installation media, it is ok to accept the defaults on CDROM/USB Key

The setup will now probe your hardware.

Select OK for the installation to being formatting and partitioning your virtual hard disk.

This process may take some time, so why not get your self a well earned coffee, or beer?

I mean – this takes a really long time – my system is a Quad Core Xeon, and this VM has 1gb of ram and it takes roughly 25 minutes.

If you hung around by your screen long enough you will have seen a few screens flash up, one saying installing files, another making swap space…

If not, you will have come back to see a screen saying, if you have a backup configuration of IPCOP you can now restore it. I’m assuming you don’t, so we will choose to skip this by selecting ‘Skip’ Press TAB to switch between options, and then press SPACE to select.

TAB down to OK to continue.

The next screen will attempt to PROBE for you NIC. I think that is the first time i have used the word PROBE in an article, and i don’t often use it in every day conversation either. Is it odd I’m enjoying the use of the word probe? I do though…. PROBE.

Sorry, side tracked there slightly.

So we are Probing for our GREEN interface. This is the interface that is considered ‘safe’ and will represent our internal network.

Press space to start Probing.

You will see a list of NICs whizz past, and hopefully it should settle on something. I am not going to say what it will settle on, as i am not sure if it is dependant on what type of Physical NIC you have in your system, mine has chosen – Digital 21x4x Tulip PCI Ethernet card.

Select OK.

We need to enter our Internal IP address now for the IPCOP system. I am a bit of a traditionalist so i keep my SBS boxes on the 192.168.16.x/24 range. So I’ll put the IPCOP on 192.168.16.254

Type in your address, including the ‘.’ and when you’re ready TAB down to OK.

You will then see a quick screen flash up saying installing GRUB, and then it will confirm a successful installation..

You’re only choice here is to read the notes, and hit OK.

Part 3

As part of my lab setup, i wanted to allow my guest operating systems (such as SBS 2003 / SBS 2008) to act as close to ‘real life’ as possible.

What i mean by this is i want them to be separated completely from the rest of my home network, and as such, be able to run DHCP and other services without conflicting with my router.

Now, some of you Hyper-V experts will probably say – oh well you could just do X and then it will work fine. Well, that is fine for you, but as i don’t know what X is – i have chosen this option, as recommended by a very good teacher.

So the solution proposed by said teacher, was to download and run IPCOP as a Nat device, bridging the gap between the virtual machines and the physical network.

What do you need?

A machine running Hyper-V (obviously)

The IPCOP ISO (here)

You may want to review the system requirements of IPCOP here

A Private Network configured in Hyper-V and an External Network (more on that here)

So, once you have done that you need to setup your Hyper-V guest.

Open up the Hyper-V manager, right click the name of your Hyper-V host, and click New, Virtual Machine.

The New Virtual Machine wizard will start.

If this is the first VM (Virtual Machine / Hyper-V Guest) you are creating, you may want to review this page, even if it isn’t it may be a reminder on some points, when your ready hit next.

So, we need to choose a name for our Guest, and choose the location to store it, if not the default.

When your ready hit next.

You will need to enter the amount of RAM you are giving the IPCOP system, my test box currently has 1gb (which i did to make the install a bit quicker, but i plan to run it on 512mb)

When your ready hit next.

IPCOP does not support the use of the Hyper-V synthetic network adapter (more on that here) so leave this set as ‘not connected’

When your ready hit next.

The next page will allow you to setup your VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) files. I am new to Hyper-V so i have tended to accept the defaults when setting things up, your choices here are quite simple – add a new disk, add an existing disk, or add a disk later.

I have chosen to add a new disk, and set it as 127gb in size. This is what is known as a Dynamically Expanding disk, (more on those here) you also can specify where to store the disk.

When your ready hit next.

Now you can choose the OS options, you can go ahead and tell it the location of the .iso file if you wish, choose install an operating system from a boot cd/dvd, choose image file and the option for iso will become active, and you can simply browse to the location of the file.

When you’re ready hit next.

Summary page – you can review the settings we have covered and hit finish when you’re happy.

Your machine will be created, and you will then see it listed as a VM in your Hyper-V manager console.

I have had to split this article into 3 parts due to Spaces blog entry size limits.

Part 2