Smoothwall Linux Firewall

[Matt1eD]

Anybody used it, how do you find it? Were/are there any problems or restrictions?

Linky

Cheers

[Moby-Dick]

I used to run a smoothwall back in the day with an alcatel USB frog modem.

it was a lot more reliable than a windows machine for ADSL routing ( this was before DSL router where 10 a penny )

it worked fine untill the motherboard on the box died , and I swapped it for a cheap dsl router

it does what it says on the box - you shoudn't expect more than a good solid firewall out of it with a couple of nice graphing features and and IDS/ caching proxy built in.

(you coudl just as easily build a cacheing proxy on your "server" and use something like prtg for traffic monitoring from your SNMP enabled router

http://www.paessler.com/prtg

[Matt1eD]

Thanks, I couldn't really sacrifice a machine to run it, when as you say routers are so cheap. I've got a 30 quid safecom all-in-one jobby (+ installed a wireless AP a few days ago), 100% reliable, never falls over only thing is crap firewall!

[Moby-Dick]

I bought a SFF compaq deskpro from a computer fair for £30 to run my smoothwall on.

[Matt1eD]

. 30 quid you got to be joking

[Moby-Dick]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...218030786&rd=1

a small hard drive is peanuts to buy and either network/ floppy install it or open the side of the case up and stick a drive in for the initial CD install.

[Moby-Dick]

. 30 quid you got to be joking

this was a couple of years back , so it was a bargain

[Matt1eD]

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...218030786&rd=1

a small hard drive is peanuts to buy and either network/ floppy install it or open the side of the case up and stick a drive in for the initial CD install.

Ooh, you've got me so tempted now. I've got a spare 8 gig HD just needing to be used. Only thing is postage price .... so tempting!

I'd probably actually set it up with a PCI internal ADSL modem, gigabit ethernet out into a switch

[joshwa]

I used to use Smoothwall 1 - it was SO reliable, never ever had a problem with it. Whereas my current wireless router / firewall needs rebooting every so often (maybe once a month or two)

[Gerschwin]

I have used Smoothwall in the past - think I ran it on a P150 - can't remember the exact amount of RAM I used but I set it up as diskless and it ran damn silent. Was very reliable and pretty easy to setup and maintain.

[jonjayal]

I've literally just swapped from Smoothwall to this www.m0n0.ch/wall.

It feels faster (BSD is highly optimised for network traffic filtering) and is a doddle to setup - took all of 5 mins.

I'd give that a try.

[Moby-Dick]

looks good !

[Gerschwin]

I've literally just swapped from Smoothwall to this www.m0n0.ch/wall.

It feels faster (BSD is highly optimised for network traffic filtering) and is a doddle to setup - took all of 5 mins.

I'd give that a try.

I had thought of using M0n0wall as it supported tose embedded pc's - could make an ultra silent, small setup - never found one at a decent price though

[Matt1eD]

Looks good. Might try that.

I've got a spare desktop which I'm planning to sell some parts of, just tried to try out smoothwall on it yesterday. I don't reckon I burnt the CD properly got the NTLDR thing (tis set to boot from CD drive). I used this http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm . If it helps I do have Nero cheers

[herbert_goon]

Hi all

Been a smoothwall user for 4 years now - love it. It runs on a celeron 333 with 32mb of ram and a 2gb drive. The reliability is what you would expect from *nix - I think i have rebooted maybe once a year (for updates!). I have 3 nics in there, Web, Lan and DMZ.


Things I like:
Runs on anything..
Supports DMZ
Virtually maintenance free
It's free
Dynamic DNS support
10 minute install
Uptime!

Things I don't
Can be difficult to determine which NIC is which when configuring
Unfirendly VPN config
Classic meaningless snort logs (anyone here have time to analyse their IDS logs?)
Log file truncation has failed me before, although it just stops logging.

I'd recomend it to anyone who knew enough about IT. At last years Windows show at Olympia the guys were there and very happy to chat.