5 open source firewalls you should know about
Website design By BotEap.comDespite the fact that pfSense and m0n0wall seem to get the most consideration in the open source firewall/router market, with pfSense overtaking m0n0wall in recent years, there are several excellent firewall/router distributions available on both Linux and Linux. as in BSD. All of these projects are based on the native firewalls of their respective operating systems. Linux, for example, builds netfilter and iptables into its kernel. OpenBSD, on the other hand, uses PF (Packet Filter), which replaced IPFilter as FreeBSD’s default firewall in 2001. The following is a (non-exhaustive) list of some of the available firewall/router distributions for Linux and BSD, along with some of its abilities.
Website design By BotEap.com[1] smooth wall
Website design By BotEap.comThe Smoothwall Open Source Project was created in 2000 to develop and maintain Smoothwall Express, a free firewall that includes its own security-hardened GNU/Linux operating system and easy-to-use web interface. SmoothWall Server Edition was the initial product of SmoothWall Ltd., released on 11-11-2001. It was essentially SmoothWall GPL 0.9.9 with support provided by the company. SmoothWall Corporate Server 1.0 was released on December 17, 2001, a closed source fork of SmoothWall GPL 0.9.9SE. Corporate Server included additional features, such as SCSI support, along with the ability to increase functionality through add-on modules. These modules included SmoothGuard (content filtering proxy), SmoothZone (multiple DMZs), and SmoothTunnel (advanced VPN features). Other modules released over time included modules for traffic shaping, antivirus, and antispam.
Website design By BotEap.comA variation of Corporate Server called SmoothWall Corporate Guardian was released, which integrates a fork of DansGuardian known as SmoothGuardian. School Guardian was created as a variant of Corporate Guardian, adding Active Directory/LDAP authentication support and firewall features in a package designed especially for use in schools. December 2003 saw the release of smoothwall Express 2.0 and a variety of complete written documentation. The alpha version of Express 3 was released in September 2005.
Website design By BotEap.comSmoothwall is designed to run effectively on older, cheaper hardware; It will run on any Pentium-class CPU and higher, with a recommended minimum of 128 MB of RAM. Also, there is a 64-bit build for Core 2 systems. Here is a list of features:
- Firewalls:
- Supports LAN, DMZ and wireless networks, as well as external networks
- External connectivity via: Static Ethernet, DHCP Ethernet, PPPoE, PPPoA using various USB and PCI DSL modems
- Port forwards, DMZ pinholes
- output filtering
- timed access
- User-friendly Quality of Service (QoS)
- Traffic statistics, including totals per interface and per IP for weeks and months
- IDS via automatically updated Snort rules
- UPnP support
- List of bad IP addresses to block
- proxies:
- Web proxy for accelerated browsing
- POP3 email proxy with antivirus
- Instant messaging proxy with real-time log viewing
- user interface:
- Responsive web interface that uses AJAX techniques to provide real-time information
- Real-time traffic graphs
- All rules have an optional comment field for ease of use.
- Log viewers for all major subsystems and firewall activity
- Maintenance:
- Backup settings
- Easy one-click application of all pending updates
- Shutdown and restart for UI
- Other:
- network time service
- Develop Smoothwall yourself using self-hosted “Devel” builds
- Based on Linux kernel 2.6.32
- New hardware support, including Cobalt, SPARC, and PPC platforms
- New installer, which allows you to install to flash or hard drives, and choose interface cards and assign them to particular networks
- Access to all web interface pages is now password protected
- A new user interface, including a new developer page, more pages in the status menu, an updated proxy page, a simplified DHCP server page, and a revised firewall menu
- The inclusion of OpenVPN support for virtual private networks, as a substitute for IPsec
- Intel Pentium I (i586)
- 128MB RAM
- 2 GB of hard disk space