Reinstalling the Smoothwall Filter & Firewall Appliance Hardware or VM

There can be a few situations when you might need to reinstall the Smoothwall. At times, Smoothwall support might suggest this in place of performing upgrades or manual fixes to the system, to ensure the integrity of the installation.

When a Smoothwall is installed on top of an existing installation, settings can be carried over from the previous install during the installation. So a reinstall is a quick way of getting an otherwise malfunctioning Smoothwall system up and running. A reinstall that carries over settings, also retains log files.

Installation methods

You can download the Smoothwall installation software as an ISO or as an IMG file. You can use the ISO to reinstall the Smoothwall on a virtual machine and on systems that have a CD drive or access to a USB CD-ROM. For the latter, you need to write the ISO to a CD.

You use the IMG file from a USB pen drive to reinstall the Smoothwall. Whilst you could also write the ISO to a USB pen drive as well by using various image writers, the installation would fail. This is because the installer looks specifically for the CD drive for the installation image.

The latest ISO can be downloaded from https://customer.smoothwall.net/download/ after inputting your software serial number. The IDex and Smoothwall Monitor managed service (Previously Visigo) software can be downloaded from that page as well.

The IMG image can be downloaded by asking support to generate a link for you. Call support or your account manager and they will be able to provide a download link for the IMG image.

For the IMG image, we recommend using etcher.io to write the image to a USB pen drive.

The install ISO and IMG file is about 700 MB in size.

Installation commands

Once the Smoothwall system has booted from either ISO or USB, the following screen will be shown:

At the boot prompt, you have three options:

• Press enter. This starts the interactive install and asks if settings should be retained or if you want a clean install.
• Enter "auto" and press enter. This retains settings and perform a non-interactive install.
• Enter "autoclean" and press enter. This doesn't retain settings or logs and performs a clean non-interactive installation.