Anyone using SmoothWall, m0n0wall or pfsense here?

V

VanFanel89

2[H]4U
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Apr 21, 2004
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If so - has anyone tried all of them and has some input? I am currently running Endian (after giving Untangle and Astaro a try) and I find that all the shit Endian has to offer, I don't really use... maybe something more lightweight would be better on my end... as long as it does VLAN tagging :D
 
I'm running m0n0wall on an Alix board right now, and I love it, bare essentials, my only real wish for it is the ability to run xuath, but I've been making due.

For VLAN tagging, m0n0wall supports it as long as the network card being used supports it, I know when I was running m0n0wall on my Wrap board, it supported it, you might want to check for support.

FYI, the Alix kit ran me about $200, and is rated to route data at up to 90mbps, and it is very low power and silent.
 
I actually have a dedicated system I build with some scraps for the router. Got a nice embedded board with two Marvell NICs (no Realtek for me!) running an Athlon 4450e 45 watt 2.3 ghz dual core with 2 GB of SO-DIMM RAM (DDR-800) and an 80 GB SATA drive.

The only thing I had to buy was a mini-ITX case but that ran me $35 at Fry's with a 150 watt PSU (pushes this little system without breaking a sweat).

All things considered, it's a powerful beast for what I want/need it to do... I just didn't have any other components haha. It has no problem running Endian (and had no problem with Astaro or Untangle) so that system has enough oomph for me to throw anything I want at it...
 
pfSense will do tagging as long as the NIC supports it. I haven't tried it myself but I know the option is there.
 
I have tried all three, I could never get smoothwall to install it always complained about something. I liked monowall alot very simple and stable but it didn't like my xbox so I switched to pfsense which is based off monowall and it also didn't like my xbox (I never did find the cause, even with upnp and the proper ports forwarded xbox live would take for ever to find a game, I have 2 xboxs and someone said that might be the problem?). I switched to clearos and it has been great, works with xbox live, very stable I haven't had to touch it in months. I'm using a 2.4 p4, 1gb ram and 2 100mb intel nics before I had a 700mhz celeron, 512mb ram and the same nics and they were perfectly fine in monowall and pfsense.

They are all pretty stable (with good hardware, i had some odd amd board that was crap for linux, can't vouch for smoothwall though), I would find one that has the features you want with out the extras and just install it.
 
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I am using smoothwall as my home router, I am also using untangle for my spam box (for my own wisp company I just started) and pfsense for my hotspot.

as for smoothwall I am using a old p3 with 768 of memory and 40 gb hard drive
as for untangle I am using HP D530 p4 with 2gb of memory and 80gb hard drive
as for pfsense I am using p3 with 512 of memory and 20gb hard drive.
 
I'm using pfSense on a dedicated rig(2.5ghz dualcore, 4 gigs ram, 40gig HD) and its configurability(is that a word?) is great :) I researched all the various routing solutions and decided on pfSense and glad I did.
 
pfSense here as well... and as of yesterday 2.0 RC1 dropped and it's awesome! I've been running the beta for a while now, and have no complaints. It's the best firewall distro out there in my opinion...

VLAN support is rock solid, I have 3 seperate VLAN's tagged to a single port on my switch and it works like a champ.
 
Using pfsense here, works well, though I have not played with vlaning. I have 4 nics on that box so it could be something fun to play with. The only thing I got it for mostly is trafic shaping and monitoring, though I find the traffic shaping really confusing.
 
pfSense

Actually up until a month ago I was running dual WAN until I changed ISPs (2 cable modems). With that setup there were a handful of static routes so that diff machines used different connections, so me and my room mate defaulted to diff WANs to avoid fighting over game pings etc. We plan on getting a 2nd connection from a different ISP and will be setting up fail-over. The box also provides a sterile network port to connect machines to while keeping them outside of our network.
 
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