Lightning Wire Labs is offering IPFire optimised for Exoscale Cloud. For any questions or support regarding IPFire on Exoscale, please contact the Lightning Wire Labs support team.

Exoscale is a GDPR-compatible European Cloud Provider based in Switzerland with locations in various countries of the EU and Switzerland.

Installation

Before you create a new instance, you will need to set up a few things on the network of your cloud.

Network Setup

A firewall routes data between multiple networks. One of the usually is the Internet, the other is the local network. By default, your cloud account only has access to the Internet, but there are no local networks.

Create a local network

Therefore, the first step is to create a local network in which all internal instances will exist like web and mail servers and everything that you will host in your cloud.

This setup is based in the Frankfurt location and it has been made clear in the name of it. Make sure to create a manual (unmanaged) network, because IPFire will provide everything necessary.

Allocate a static IP address

In order to terminate VPNs and configure DNS records that point to your firewall, it is recommended to allocate a static IP address which will be assigned to the RED interface of IPFire.

Create a Security Group

As a last step before we can launch the new IPFire instance, we will need to create a new Security Group. Security Groups are basically firewall rules in the cloud. But since IPFire is a firewall itself and has many more features than the cloud, we will create a new Security Group that simply forwards everything to IPFire.

Add all network protocols with all available ports - if applicable - to it.

Launching IPFire

Finally, we are ready to launch a new IPFire instance on the cloud. For that, head to the instances overview and create a new one.

Make sure to enter a useful hostname at the top of the page and to select the latest version of IPFire.

Further down at the bottom of the page, select the local network and security group that we just created.

Select your SSH key and press "Create". It will take a short moment to create and boot your instance.

The instance page will show you a SSH command you will need to use to start with the setup of IPFire:

After connecting to the instance using SSH you will be greeted by a dialogue that lets you set passwords and complete the network setup for the local network zones.

Congratulations

You installed IPFire on Exoscale.