Is Smoothwall any good?

[ives]

A friend who is setting up a small business with an Ethernet and ADSL asked me what kind of firewall he should install. I was told that smothwall was good.
Does anyone have any opinions on this or any other suggestions?


cheers
ives

[Steve]

It's small and supports a lot of network interfaces, but I've not used it - I couldn't get it to work.

However, I use a stupid ADSL interface and protocol (damn ISP!)

I like clarkconnect :- www.clarkconnect.com - it has lots of good stuff with it - powered by RH9.0

[Moby-Dick]

clark connect has more features ( it can run asn an FTP/WEB/file/mail server as well as a NAT based firewall like smoothwall does ) but if you just want a pure NAT based router/firewall then smoothwall is great.

what exactly is he wanting to block ? the firewalls built into many ethernet routers are just as good ( example , Vigor Draytek 2600 )

[ives]

to be honest,I don't know much about Networks or firewalls.
I have Sygate on my desktop PC and have tried quite a few,like Zone Alarm but Smoothwall seems a bit more sophisticated.Is that right?
What extra things does it do that,say, Sygate does not?

Sorry to be ignorant,but what is NAT?

cheers
Ives

[unrealrocks]

I tryed to setup SmoothWall on an old 533Mhz machine but had no luck, got it installed and running but it just wouldnt recognise my NTL modem even tho it was running simply as an eth interface!

[Agent]

Originally posted by ives
to be honest,I don't know much about Networks or firewalls.
I have Sygate on my desktop PC and have tried quite a few,like Zone Alarm but Smoothwall seems a bit more sophisticated.Is that right?
What extra things does it do that,say, Sygate does not?

Sorry to be ignorant,but what is NAT?

cheers
Ives

NAT = Network Address Translation

Allows more than one computer to use the same IP online (simplified)

[Moby-Dick]

Originally posted by ives
to be honest,I don't know much about Networks or firewalls.
I have Sygate on my desktop PC and have tried quite a few,like Zone Alarm but Smoothwall seems a bit more sophisticated.Is that right?
What extra things does it do that,say, Sygate does not?

Sorry to be ignorant,but what is NAT?

cheers
Ives

Zone alarm and Sygate are windows based software firewalls.
Smoothwall turns an old spec PC into a NAT ( network address Translation ) based ADSL/Ethernet Router. This means that its used to share the web connections to the rest of the network. It will prevent unauthorised access on random ports into the system , or you can allow certian inbound ports thourhg if you wish to run a server behind the firewall.

What it wont do is easily block outbound ports. This isn't as much of a problem as you'd imagine , providing you keep your antivirus software upto date and do your Windows updates regularly.

I use a smoothwall combined with an alcatel "frog" usb modem and its great - I've not had to touch the box for months, it just works !

for a coprorate environment however , Id recommend buying an ADSL router with the funcitonality built into it, such as the Vigor above. This will do exactly the same as smoothwall (and more ) but cost about £150. If you dont have an "old" box aroudn that woudl be suitable then its not much of an economy ( remeber that old box has to be still reliable or the company looses its web access - not a good thing ! )

[ives]

Thanks Moby-Dick.

Your explanation is super-clear.

Just on a related note. If an office only had about 8 or so machines, do you really need a router, or could you just use peer to peer networking to share files and the interenet?

cheers,
ives

[Moby-Dick]

The router shares the internet - ytou can share files at a work group level , but remeber that if you use XP pro for example , you can only have 10 concurrent shares ( including printers )

If you really wanted to use one of your PC's as a gateway for the others you could do , but
a) you'd loose web connectivity if that machine was switched off
b) take a performanc ehit on the gateway machine
c) have a little less controll.

£150 spent on a draytek router will be hassle free( this is very important if your mate aint paying you )

it will also also VPN connections in ( means that if ness. you can work from home over a VPN )

If you want a low cost server appliance for file/print sharing etc then you cant go too far wrong with Clarkconnect.

check your PM's

[ives]

Hi Moby,

I just spoke to my friend and he wanted to ask about people working from home,since he intends to have at least a couple of people working from home via ADSL.

If you went the smoothwall route, would it be a problem working from home via an ADSL connection and logging into the network? Presumably it would be easier with a seperate router?

PS.What is VPN?

Cheers,
ives

[joshwa]

VPN - Virtual Private networking.

I don't know how you'd do that with smoothwall (as i haven't done this). I guess you could (one option) would be to setup VNC on the work PCs and let them use their own desktop. (A bit like citrix server but different).

I used smoothwall, and it's got built in proxy (so if you have a slow net connection this might help) and it's also got DHCP built in, which is really cool coz then you don't need to manually assign the PCs IP addresses.

Smoothwall is gr8

Josh

[Moby-Dick]

Originally posted by ives
Hi Moby,

I just spoke to my friend and he wanted to ask about people working from home,since he intends to have at least a couple of people working from home via ADSL.

If you went the smoothwall route, would it be a problem working from home via an ADSL connection and logging into the network? Presumably it would be easier with a seperate router?

PS.What is VPN?

Cheers,
ives

a VPN is as John sadi, a virtual private network. This means that you "dial" into your private network using a secure tunnel over the web.

Smoothwall will support VPN's but they are not the type best suited to connecting remote users ( they are more of the type to link multiple smoothwalls together )

If you wanted to still use a smoothwall , but required remote user VPN's you will need something else to host the VPN

Windows 2000/2003 server will do this straight out of the box ( with a little configuration ) but there are cheaper alternatives if you dont want a full client/ server infrastructure. such as this

http://www.secure-planet.com/products/02vpn.aspx


remeber also that an ADSL line is great for download but not so for upload, so dont try and host too many people on the VPN.

[ives]

Thanks again, Moby.
Most interesting.

I know, I know... I should just read a book on Networking.

However, when you say:
"If you wanted to still use a smoothwall , but required remote user VPN's you will need something else to host the VPN"
do you mean you need a 2nd computer (apart from the one running Smoothwall) just to host the VPN?

cheers,
ives

[Moby-Dick]

Yes - Try not to think of the box that smoothwall runs on as a computer as such ( sounds odd dont' it )

smoothwall turns the box into a dedicated routing appliance. Its possilbe to hack a smoothwall to add extra service onto it , but I wouldn't recommend it.

If you had a router then you'd still need another Box to host the VPN connections with ( this could also be a mail/file server as well )

I should be getting commision from draytek for this , but if you had one of their routers you'd just need that as it woudl share your DSL for you and host the VPN ( its not a file server though as its only little )

http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/products.html


(they also do wireless versions shoud you friend want to progress that way too)

[Moby-Dick]

nb: the commercial version of smoothwall (www.smoothwall.net) has much more functionality as a web based control appliance, including modules for content controll and VPN hosting.

however its not too cheap

[ives]

Thanks Moby.

Yep, I've completely got the idea that the computer that Smoothwall runs on is no longer a computer .It's just become a router.

So, are you saying that if you had a router that shared files/the internet over the network, you would still need another box (computer?) just to host the VPN connections?

About the Draytrek routers: when you say it's not a file server, do you mean that it wouldn't allow you to share files over a network, only the DSL connection?

cheers,
ives