COMMAND & CONTROL

Being a Linux distro— albeit a unique one, given that IPFire isn’t necessarily built on top of the likes of Debian, Red Hat, et al—you can gain access to IPFire’s command-line interface from any machine on your network, once you’ve switched it on via “System > SSH access.” Windows doesn’t naturally support SSH, so you need a tool that’s happy to connect to it (PuTTY, from www.putty.org, is ideal), and IPFire uses a non-standard port for security reasons, so note that you have to connect to port 222 rather than 22.

Once you’re connected, you can do all sorts of handy network things. Try pinging devices on your network by typing

ping <ip address> or testing your Internet connection by pinging a web address. Take it further, and use the

traceroute command to see the entire path to a device. Look at what’s running on your IPFire box, and exactly what sort of resources it’s taking up, by installing htop from the “IPFire > Pakfire” menu, then running htop from within the command line. Heck, you could even set up user IDs for everyone in your home, and give them all a Linux shell to play with. It’s up to you.