Smoothwall Firewall and Zentyal

[QuentinJ]

Hi

Just thought that I would inform a few about the above to Linux based programs that can act as excellent firewalls.
I have been using Smoothwall Professional for years on an old 1 GB 686 CPU with 1 GB of RAM and two NICS. It offers IDS, port forwarding, VPN, and many other features.

Zentyal is a much larger package and has a mail server, email server, firewall, port forwarding, IDS, Virus protection etc. built in. I have just configured a system for a school on an HP Proliant Micro Server with 2 x 250 GB hard drives, 2 x NICs and 4 GB of RAM. It runs like a charm.

I feel even a small firewall with port forwarding is required for the home user. If offers that additional layer of protection between the LAN and the Router.

Regards

Quentin

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Thanks Quentin. I'm running a Smoothwall box at home, haven't tried Zentyal. Does it allow traffic monitoring and accounting per connected workstation? And does it allow QoS per workstation?

 

[InvisibleJim]

Thanks Quentin. I'm running a Smoothwall box at home, haven't tried Zentyal. Does it allow traffic monitoring and accounting per connected workstation? And does it allow QoS per workstation?

Here's the doc links

http://doc.zentyal.org/en/qos.html
http://doc.zentyal.org/en/monitor.html

Zentyal's quite a nice Ubuntu based distro. I was going to use version 2 but I had some problems getting the port forwarding working properly. I ran out of time before I could fix it and had to go with ClearOS but I may give it another look now there is a newer version out.

 

[MDKza]

The things you can do with linux is amazing, throw that whole os into ram and u have fast ass firewall.

 

[SauRoNZA]

If you guys want this kind of thing purely for Home use you might want to look at the Astaro Home Edition which is absolutely free for a single use X86 installation.

It's a proper commercial product that normally goes hand in hand with a hardware device.

 

[InvisibleJim]

Zentyal, ClearOS and Smoothwall are all commercial open source products with paid support options available if you want/need them.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

I am still very impressed by the QoS on Smoothwall. Nothing else I tried comes close - today I was busy using NNTP, downloading a 200MB app through the Play store on my phone, browsing MyBB and watching Youtube videos at the same time with absolutely no issues with slow browsing or buffering on the videos. Super impressed.

 

[DominionZA]

If you guys want this kind of thing purely for Home use you might want to look at the Astaro Home Edition which is absolutely free for a single use X86 installation.

It's a proper commercial product that normally goes hand in hand with a hardware device.

This looks good. Only solution in this thread - besides Kerio - that seems to have decent real time flow per client monitoring. I hate not being able to see which device on my network is chomping the line.
Going to install this in the AM and give it a try.

EDIT: Okay, been using this all day today. Another fail solution unfortunately. The real time monitoring per device just blows. I don't know why anyone - except Kerio - can't implement a simple real time monitoring solution.

Damn... Was hoping to get out of annual license fees.