Ipcop/Smoothwall

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mlungu1

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Hi there.

Currently I run 10 machines and have the router as a gateway. In other words, no server. My understanding has been that the built in firewall of the router would be sufficient protection. Would there be a real benefit using as a gateway and using smoothwall or ipcop? Would that not slow down the connection as there is an extra step in between, especially using an old box?

Tks in advance
 
Just read back my own post. Oops. I meant to say " would there be a real benefit using a server as a gateway...

sorry
 
It won't slow anything down, but it will use more power + you'll need more hardware - a PC.

You'll have more control, with the ability to do things like dynamic DNS, traffic shaping, usage accounting per box - a lot more than your average router can do IOW.
 
On this topic, are there anything out there that can detect if traffic is local or international (no matter what the address is) and then send that traffic through 2 diffrent servers to the outside world? Because allot of websites are .co.za but are hosted internationally, and some websites say .net or .org and are hosted locally?
 
Hmmm - not 100% qualified to comment.

IP ranges to a certain extent are location based, but not strictly so. Then we have the proxy server issue.

I'd actually like to know more about that myself - maybe someone with some good knowledge can give us the skinny ?
 
It's fairly simple to determine local and international traffic, all you need is the local BGP routing table. Thankfully IS provides this for free (telnet into route-server.is.co.za).
 
mlungu1 said:
Hi there.

Currently I run 10 machines and have the router as a gateway. In other words, no server. My understanding has been that the built in firewall of the router would be sufficient protection. Would there be a real benefit using as a gateway and using smoothwall or ipcop? Would that not slow down the connection as there is an extra step in between, especially using an old box?
Click to expand...
If you are going to add a server, you might as well configure a proxy at the same time...For 10 users it may have a significant impact on your cap usage. And any lag from an additional hop and local processing will probably be offset by quicker response for commonly accessed images.
 
Hi,

Tks. I'm not so worried about the hardware - have a few p2's lying around. The power would be minimal I'd imagine. I understand the control part, which is why i'm interested in it but have been worried about slow-down. The dyndns issue can be done without the server as well by the way - my router does it for me on the one line and on the other line I just let one of the pc's do that.

But I would like to limit bandwidth per machine so I will be testing this!
 
arf9999 said:
...RoDent and Perdition seem to be resident experts.
Click to expand...
Statement confirmed within 5 minutes!
Perdition said:
It's fairly simple to determine local and international traffic, all you need is the local BGP routing table. Thankfully IS provides this for free (telnet into route-server.is.co.za).
Click to expand...
 
Hehe, I'm not THAT much of an expert :D Anyway I don't think you can get the routes directly via BGP but it's fairly easy to dump the routing table via telnet and write a script to parse the info and update your router.

Rodent has a script here to get the dump:
http://rodent.za.net/BGPInformation
 
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