What's a good firewall to play around with?

I was looking into Smoothwall and IPcop to try. I was wondering which do you guys think I should use or if you have any other suggestions.

I also have a small side question. What do you guys think of AntiVir antivirus?

You might want to take a look at this to see if your hw is going to work. I personally use spybot w/ registry blocker. People say nod32 is good also.

Antivir is pretty good...but IMO the best free antivirus around is AVS...engine by Kaspersky, it's free through AOL. Yes...AOL..but they don't have anything to do with the software engine..it's Kaspersky's engine. That, and Antivir, are pretty much the best 2x free ones today. Avast has gotten bloated, great detection, but slows down PCs a bit. And AVGs detection rates have plummeted over the years.

Now for your firewalls...dabble with IPCop..and make sure you download and install the Copfilter add-on...you can really crank it up into a full UTM device (unified threat management). Snort intrusion detection, antivirus scanning of traffic flowing through the router, spam removal of e-mail traffic, etc. Another one that's worthy...actually it's my favorite *nix distro router....Endian. It's pretty much IPCop with the Copfilter add-on..already integrated into one smooth polished package.

These distros stand above the other ones..that don't have these features.

http://ipcop.org/
http://copfilter.org/
http://www.endian.it/

I'm thinking about trying IPcop, since it has a lot of those addons. I've been wanting to play around with Snort as well.

I have had very good luck with Antivir over the past few years, they now have auto update every 24 hours. It has warned me about virus a couple of times when I was surfing where I probably shouldn't have, never had a virus problem with it.

A whole lot better than Norton or Mcafee that I paid for in the past, no more annoying "you need to upgrade (and pay for) to the latest......bs.

There are some tests out there that put Antivir as one of the best out of any, pay for, or free. I love free and best.

NAT

hands down, number of features and configurability, pfSense is the best firewall ive seen (and ive tried a lot of them, but not for the past 18 months). 18 months ago i dropped smoothwall because you could only do a max of 3 interfaces, no snmp, only 1 IP per interface, etc etc etc.

pfsense is designed to compete with enterprise class firewall systems (ie, multi-WAN, multi-firewall-clusters, site-site vpns, client-to-firewall vpns, captive portal like at a hotel, etc etc etc).

www.pfsense.org, ftw.

Sharaz Jek said:

hands down, number of features and configurability, pfSense is the best firewall ive seen (and ive tried a lot of them, but not for the past 18 months). 18 months ago i dropped smoothwall because you could only do a max of 3 interfaces, no snmp, only 1 IP per interface, etc etc etc.

pfsense is designed to compete with enterprise class firewall systems (ie, multi-WAN, multi-firewall-clusters, site-site vpns, client-to-firewall vpns, captive portal like at a hotel, etc etc etc).

www.pfsense.org, ftw.

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That does look nice. Does it have a feature like Copfilter on IPcop? That is one main thing interests me in IPcop. So far, I haven't been able to find a program like that, which I could just use on my main computer.

How many of these other firewalls support addons? Are the addons in IPcop worth it over the the other firewalls?

these firewalls are all not something you install within windows right? These are for dedicated boxes correct?

I ran a smoothwall box for awhile, it was insanely rock solid and is nicely tweakable and good for someone to begin with as its pretty friendly.

I got an Endian firewall up and running. I think I'll play around with this for a little while.

erehwon6811 said:

How many of these other firewalls support addons? Are the addons in IPcop worth it over the the other firewalls?

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In my opinion..yes...the add-ons such as Copfilter make it stand above the rest (besides Endian). It's these "transparent proxy" features such as antivirus, anti spam, and in newer versions...anti-ad/spyware scanning, which really bring good UTM features to them. Running other *nix distros that don't have these features, to me, they're just a NAT router.