Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Live CD Firewall/Routers

A while back i went looking for a free firewall to replace a dieing watchguard box. I noticed that there are a lot of free and very easy to use software firewalls out there. Boot an old box from a CD and bam instant firewall for free (if you had the hardware)

A few choices i came by.

m0n0wall

Smoothwall

redWall Firewall

NetBoz

Devil-Linux

floppyfw

The features i was looking for

The ability to have more then 1 External IP address (easily)

The ability to be a filtering bridge instead of a router

A nice GUI based rules/nat interface

some limited reporting

Frequent updates to features

FREE!!!!

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After spending a ton of time looking at the options of the above firewalls (and a few others) i decided to stick with monowall. It has all the features i want, a very helpful community, and they update the package on a regular basis. It has been running strong for over 1 year with no problems.

-PB

1 comments:

mick said...

I would suggest for consideration
1/ ClearOS
2/ ipcop
3/ Untangle