Industrial Strength Firewall, Poor Mans Budget
What in this world could protect your computer(s) or network better than a firewall? If you said not connecting your machine to the Internet your right, but most of us can’t live for more than a few minutes without being online. Hell, it gives me the shakes.
Now, here at the Frank residences we have multiple machines. A family machine, a MythTV box, various gaming consoles, a bunch of laptops, and a bunch of servers that preform various tasks. We also have multiple static IP’s to help out with the work load. It’s a lot of traffic coming and going, and although a basic Linksys or Dlink might do just fine, I was looking for something more flexible, something more powerful. I have gone through many open source firewall/router packages in the past and they all have their pro’s and con’s, but one the I have stumbled on and love is pfSense.
This project started in 2004 as a fork of the m0n0wall project, but focused towards full PC installations rather than the embedded hardware focus of m0n0wall. pfSense also offers an embedded image for Compact Flash based installations, however it is not the primary focus. It has a powerful packaging system that allows you to add additional functionality like a squid proxy server or Radius server to it’s already long list of features.
Right out of the box you get some neat features that you might only see in a massive commercial product.
- Outbound Load Balancing – If you have multiple Internet connections you can use the built in load balancing feature to bridge them together into one fat pipe.
- VPN – Built in OpenVPN, PPTP and IPsec servers for when you fell like calling home.
- Redundancy – Setup 2 multiple firewalls. In case one pfSense server dies, the other one will pick up the slack.
- Real Time Graphing – See exactly what’s going on with your traffic.
If you have a spare PC laying around and want the solid protection that a industrial grade firewall can offer then give pfSense a try. You really don’t need to be a BSD wizard to install it either. Download the iso, burn it to a cd, load the cd and choose install. All of the configuration and settings are changed via’s it’s intuitive web page.
Give it a whirl, you won’t be disappointed.
What about this?
http://www.pfsense.org/
Is this firewall any good?
http://www.alphashield.com/
I have also tried outpost firewall.
@Noam – pfsense is a packet filter based firewall that runs off of BSD. I use it at home and have used it for quite a while. It’s very good. It’s a fork of the m0n0wall project.