5 Open Source Firewalls You Should Know About

Even though pfSense and m0n0wall seem to get the lion's share of consideration on view source firewall/router market, with pfSense edging out m0n0wall recently, you will find several excellent firewall/router distributions accessible under both Linux and BSD. Many of these projects develop their particular OSes native fire walls. Linux, for example, includes netfilter and iptables into its kernel. OpenBSD, however, uses PF (Packet Filter), which changed IPFilter as FreeBSD's default firewall in 2001. This is a (non-thorough) listing of a couple of from the firewall/router distributions readily available for Linux and BSD, together with a few of their abilities.

[1] Smoothwall

The Smoothwall Free Project was placed in 2000 to be able to develop and keep Smoothwall Express - a totally free firewall which includes its very own security-hardened GNU/Linux operating-system and a simple-to-use web interface. SmoothWall Server Edition was the first product from SmoothWall Ltd., released on 11-11-2001. It had been basically SmoothWall GPL .9.9 with support provided from the organization. SmoothWall Corporate Server 1. was launched on 12-17-2001, a closed source fork of SmoothWall GPL .9.9SE. Corporate Server incorporated capabilities for example SCSI support, together with the capacity to improve functionality by means of add-on modules. These modules incorporated SmoothGuard (content blocking proxy), SmoothZone (multiple DMZ) and SmoothTunnel (advanced VPN features). Further modules launched with time incorporated modules for traffic shaping, anti-virus and anti-junk e-mail.

An alternative of Corporate Server known as SmoothWall Corporate Protector was launched, integrating a fork of DansGuardian referred to as SmoothGuardian. School Protector was produced like a variant of Corporate Protector, adding Active Directory/LDAP authentication support and firewall features inside a package designed specifically for use within schools. December 2003 saw the discharge of smoothwall Express 2. and a range of comprehensive written documentation. The alpha form of Express 3 was launched in September 2005.

Smoothwall is made to run effectively on older, cheaper hardware it'll work on any Pentium class CPU and above, having a suggested the least 128 Megabytes RAM. Furthermore there's a 64-bit build for Core 2 systems. Here's a listing of features:

Firewalling:

Supports LAN, DMZ, and Wireless systems, plus exterior

Exterior connectivity via: Static Ethernet, DHCP Ethernet, PPPoE, PPPoA using various USB and PCI DSL modems

Port forwards, DMZ pin-holes

Outgoing blocking

Timed access

Easy to use Quality-of-Service (QoS)

Traffic stats, including per interface and per IP totals for days and several weeks

IDS via instantly up-to-date Snort rules

UPnP support

Listing of bad IP addressed to bar

Proxies:

Web proxy for faster browsing

POP3 e-mail proxy with Anti-Virus

IM proxy with real-time log-viewing