What's up, prox

John Van Ostrand john-Da48MpWaEp0CzWx7n4ubxQ at public.gmane.org
Fri May 25 12:53:52 UTC 2007


On Thu, 2007-05-24 at 22:42 -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> 1) Ubuntu or Smoothwall?
> 
> Is it better to get and hack a distribution designed solely to be a
> firewall, or to set up a general purpose distro to be one? The reviews of
> Smoothwall look interesting, however it seems that the free version misses
> some of the features I want ("SmoothGuardian"  is part of the commercial
> non-free enhanced product). I look at
> http://www.smoothwall.net/products/comparison.gpl.php and fear that the
> GPL version is just a bit too crippled -- and that making changes that
> deviate from the core not only makes support difficult, but also require
> command-line tuning that's the opposite of the system's whole GUI-friendly
> approach. Dan's Guardian is just another package in the Ubuntu repository
> universe.

We have been using IPCop in a few places and it seems to be doing well.
I would normally have recommended it but you mentioned "hacking"

The one barrier to hacking an IPCop system is that it is a bare-bones
Linux From Scratch distro. The distro itself has no compiler and is
missing a lot of command line tools you may want for scripting.

That is not to say it can't be hacked, just that it may be easier to get
a highly customized solution working on a general purpose distro.

Now if you want a really good firewall with lots of existing features
and you are willing to spend a little more time customizing IPCop is a
great choice.

The pros of IPCop:

- It's modular. You may be able to find modules for what you're trying
to do.
- It's completely open source. There is no commercial organization
holding back features.
- It has easy update to later versions.
- Great GUI
- Great IPSec and VPN tools.
- Support for firmware only systems

The cons:

- No support for RAID (unless you use my patch)
- No dev environment on deployed systems
- No commercial support



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